Marathon is the latest first-person extraction shooter game from the developers of Halo and Destiny, boasting an impressive art style, addictive gunplay, yet a clunky and frustrating experience to get to it.
Marathon is one of the most complicated games I’ve played in years. And by that I mean it’s a very busy game, with plenty of good elements, but also some confusing ones that I’m struggling with.
I played roughly 10 hours during the game’s most recent Server Slam and an additional five hours after its official release yesterday. While I’ve enjoyed my time with Marathon, I have to admit, it’s been one of the toughest games to get into, and I say that as a League of Legends player.
While the gunplay is addictive and matches are fairly quick, I found myself getting bogged down by a convoluted menu system, some fairly clunky quality-of-life issues, and a struggle to adapt to this game’s unforgiving learning curve.
Bungie and Sony have teased that more content is to come later this month, which is set to round off a more realised version of the game. So for this reason, Marathon is tough to review because it feels like we’ve yet to see everything the game has to offer – almost as though we’re in the tutorial before a real endgame experience is on offer.
In saying that, there’s still plenty to talk about. Because to get to this expanded end-game, we need to talk about its first few hours to determine if it’s even worth sticking with.
What is Marathon?
If you’re unfamiliar with what Marathon is (and you’d be forgiven, thanks to its more vague marketing rollout), the game is essentially a Player vs Player vs Environment (PvPvE) extraction shooter game. If you’ve played Escape from Tarkov or the most recent Arc Raiders, you should be fairly familiar with this type of game.
You play as a “Runner”, a bio-synthetic character tasked with collecting unique items on the abandoned colony of Tau Ceti IV. As you explore this oppressive and dark world, you’ll come face to face with the UESC, a police force of security robots who will kindly give you something to shoot at. You may also face off against other players and their squad while they attempt to pick up valuable items on their run.
After gathering items and completing a few missions, you’ll be able to extract. Although other players will often camp these spots, so you can expect a firefight ahead. If you die before getting to extract, you’ll lose all of the items you’ve looted on your run, in addition to anything you brought in with you, making death very punishing.
You’ll be able to select a character dubbed “Shells”, who all come equipped with unique abilities to help you on your run. These can include a scanner to locate enemies nearby, a protective shield to soak damage, or a grappling hook for extra mobility.
A Gameplay Loop That is Both Satisfying and Frustrating
Before heading into a run, you can accept different contracts, which will offer new missions to complete during your run. These can range from really simple tasks like “Heal three times in a match” to more complex ones that’ll have you activate some obscure button on the map without much to go on.
An early one most players will come across will ask you to scan an FTL array at any UESC tower on the map. If you’re like me, you’ll spend multiple runs sprinting across the major zones trying to find this unmarked radio tower before giving up and looking up a guide.
The reward for these missions will grant you extra vault space, money earned by picking up specific loot, stamina and more. So you’ll want to complete these to ensure your runs go smoothly and you get more resources for them.
This is all fairly simple, but navigating these menus can feel incredibly overwhelming. You’re bombarded with information in flashy, user-unfriendly sub-menus that’ll also scream at you with various sci-fi “bleep bloop” noises. I’ve never interacted with a menu that felt so hostile towards its players and made me feel so overstimulated that I felt like I needed to take a walk after accepting a single quest.
When playing with friends for the first time, we all struggled to realise whether we had even accepted our first contract, as we kept clicking through the menu, unsure if we were doing anything. After a few hours adjusting to it, it didn’t get any easier.
Which sucks, as so much progression is gated behind such a dense and chaotic system.
Thankfully, when you’re finally in the game and you’re exploring Tau Ceti IV, you’re able to momentarily forget about this game’s very clunky UI. That is, until you get an elusive mission that has you trying to coordinate with a group of strangers to hunt down an antenna on the roof, only to discover you can’t interact with it because another party has first.
A Marathon With Legs
While I do have issues with the game, it’s hard to deny it takes some interesting swings. Not all of them work for me, but at the same time, with games like this, I feel that a lot of the “fun” is buried deeper in the game. It’s tough to properly gauge whether my frustrations with the game are just a skill issue that’ll be resolved with more time with it.
Marathon is a surprisingly unique game from Bungie. I don’t mean for my uncertainty to erase the criticisms I have with the game right now, because there are broader elements worth drawing attention to. It’s expensive monetisation system, clunky UI, forcing players to stare at an unsettling moth for minutes while searching for a game, all things I feel are valid to highlight here.
But if you want just a game to quickly drop in, loot some items, shoot at some robots (or people robots), then Marathon is definitely successful at crafting that tight gameplay loop. The entire world of Tau Ceti IV goes out of its way to kill you, and I’ve yet to have a run where I wasn’t hyper-aware and locked in to everything around me.
For that reason alone, I’m finding it hard not to just queue up another run to finish off this article.
But until the game’s official ranked mode launches at the end of March, along with this new endgame zone map, I feel like it’s too soon to tell if the game has the legs to keep me invested for the long-term.
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