Marathon Review - For Now, It's A Sprint

Extraction shooters are often polarizing, just as much, if not more so, than the battle royale genre. The idea of potentially losing items on a run isn’t exciting to a lot of prospective players, but to a lot of folks (myself included), it can be a rush. Marathon is on track to deliver that unique thrill with some seriously out-there visuals.

However, some hangups are preventing it from being as good as it could be. With any luck, developer Bungie will spruce up the strong foundation of Marathon to make it a bit more palatable.

Marathon Is More Than Meets The Eye

There's More Here Than Your Average Extraction Shooter

Marathon is an extraction game through and through. If you haven't played a game like this before, the idea is that you plop into a zone with a pre-chosen loadout, grab as much stuff as you can, and literally "extract" out of the map.

Typically, these are played with groups of people over voice chat, but some games allow concessions like proximity chat (including Marathon) to appeal to solo gamers. In fact, Marathon has several levers for solo players, including a specific class for them.

Speaking of classes (called “shells” in the Marathon universe) here are your options:

• Destroyer (Offense)
• Vandal (Movement)
• Recon (Intel)
• Assassin (Invisibility)
• Triage (Healing)
• Thief (Heist)
• Rook (Solo)

Each shell is also fully capable of fighting on its own, regardless of the special/ultimate abilities it has at its fingertips. After testing out each one, I settled on Triage as my “main” frame. The ability to heal on command really helped out a lot of aggressive players who would put themselves into bad situations, and I managed to save a ton of runs.

No matter which shell I tried, I wasn't shocked to see that Marathon controlled wonderfully, which is a staple of Bungie's modern era. For as many issues as I had with Destiny 1 and 2, the core FPS gameplay was not one of them. Most of the guns in the game work immaculately, and the special abilities are more low-key in Marathon but impactful, and allow for plenty of hero moments.

Even if you're the type of player who takes a long time to get used to the extraction genre, you can still eke out those hero moments and build yourself back up, gear-wise. It's a squad-based game for a reason.

Progressing through Marathon, you’ll follow the same basic game flow:

• Select a contract (a form of quests), loadout, and shell
• Load into a map
• Grab loot while aiming to complete contracts
• Exfiltrate the map using specific points

An average run is roughly 15-20 minutes, which fits many people's schedules, including mine. It's also great pacing to get in, do some damage/earnest exploring, then get out (or die trying). While map variety is a long-term concern, the ones that are included are meticulously detailed and gorgeous to look at.

It took me around five runs to acclimate to Marathon and learn its best practices organically. Things like preloading your Shell with ammo before a run, so you don't clean yourself out in minutes, that sort of stuff. It's crucial to continued success, and some of it does come organically, while other elements of Marathon are more obtuse, both deliberately and accidentally (more on that in a moment).

As you run through the game, you’ll unlock more maps, gear, and contracts. There’s also a progression system that unlocks bonuses for the current season, like additional vault capacity. As per Bungie’s current plan, progress will be reset each season, allowing everyone to start fresh.

It’s a double-edged sword, as some players really like the prospect of starting a season on the same footing as everyone else, and others are frustrated at losing their rewards beyond cosmetics. I’m somewhere in the middle, but the seasonal resets aren’t a "problem" just yet.

There Are Lots Of Hangups, Though

And They Add Up

What is a problem, however, is the UI, which is, frankly, a complete mess. On PC, which the cursors and layout seem uniquely designed for, it's incredibly clunky and hard to read, even as an extraction shooter and RPG veteran. It’s hard to tell what items are because of similar-looking icons. You really need to put in the time to discern each loadout item, which can be a plus for some but can get annoying in the moment during a run.

Grabbing items while you’re being shot at can be just the right amount of hectic, but it’s not particularly fun to read all the descriptions of each piece of loot while you decide to sell it or keep it. After a few hours, it's easier to discern the game's language, but this isn’t as much of a casual “pick up and play” kind of extraction shooter.

Another big negative for Marathon is the stingy "reward pass," which is Bungie's version of a season pass. Seemingly taking no lessons from the last eight-ish years of battle/season pass development, it doesn't provide in-game currency or tantalizing rewards. It's just as dull as the Halo Infinite season pass was at its launch, if not more so. Those comparisons are even more warranted because Marathon's passes also don't expire, which is the one positive from the current iteration of the reward pass.

What I would really like to see from Bungie in the near future is a complete UI overhaul. The game looks gorgeous in motion once you're actually spawned in, but messing with the menus feels like a chore.

Marathon Could Evolve Into Something More

It Has A Great Baseline

Marathon’s endgame is also slated to arrive a few weeks after launch, which will inject more repeatable content into the game. Titled the Cryo Archive, it's described by Bungie as the "pinnacle endgame zone." However, folks need to get to that point to actually enjoy it. The existence of a future update that did not arrive at launch does not change the launch experience that Bungie is charging $40 for right now.

Despite my hangups, Marathon is the kind of game that I’d easily come back to after a major update and comfortably jump into. For now, it's a tad more annoying than I'd like, but not enough to dissuade me from playing it, either by myself or with some friends.