Marathon, the new extraction shooter coming from Destiny vets Bungie, has had an uphill battle. The long road to release has been plagued by many a controversy, from plagiarism accusations to weak testing from players. It let Bungie to make the decision to delay Marathon from its initial launch window last September to just days away.
With many spending the last few days in an open Server Slam, the resounding question was, can Marathon reach the heights that Bungie has previously been known for? The answer is complicated, but there is hope because of the strong shooter fundamentals Marathon is built on, even if not everything works.
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Marathon brings players to the surface of Tau Ceti IV, scraping by in a galaxy that does not care. There’s plenty of lore and story drops, focusing on the different companies vying for power, and each new group you meet is gunning for your attention.
The loop in Marathon is deceptively simple: get in, get as much loot as you can, don’t die, get out. It makes for an engaging run of checks and balances, where every encounter is one that could doom your current expedition, losing everything you’re carrying in one fell swoop.
Marathon’s gameplay loop is deceptively simple and really rewarding.
Completing contracts for the aforementioned crews nets experience that can be used to upgrade your character, with each group offering different benefits. One may add deluxe backpacks to the armory, letting players buy space when really needed. Another increases looting speed, buying back a precious few seconds at critical points as you frantically try to grab whatever isn’t nailed down.
These contracts add an overall sense of progression that softens the punch of losing loot, as even if you die, you don’t lose progress on them. The internal dialogue flies by, as you make quick calls: do you try to finish a contract even if you’re risking some rare item or dope new weapon, or do you bail out, focusing on keeping what you have?
It makes for an sticky gameplay loop, where the one more run mentality starts to take root in your mind quickly. Playing with a crew is awesome and makes the overall experience more balanced, with most of my solo runs ending in getting trounced by another full team or overrun by robots. That was, until I started reframing the solo approach, focusing on using the Rook combat shell.
The Rook genuinely changes how Marathon should be approached. It’s a combat shell that can only be used solo, one limited in its kit, but nonetheless important. Choosing the Rook locks you out from your armory, a precious pistol, and a few abilities, the only things with you at the outset.
It drops you into a game already in progress, with your only mission to scavenge as much as you can and get out. Your abilities can help heal and mask you from the robots, turning Marathon into more of a stealth game than an active shooter. It’s a fun twist that makes solo play feel different from the more run-and-gun group offerings.
All that being said, Marathon does have some issues that make the barrier to entry a difficult one. The UI is way too complicated and unintuitive, where finding what you need can always be a couple of button clicks too many. Especially playing on console, where the interface feels designed for PC.
Marathon’s barrier to entry is quite high, all thanks to its UI.
It’s hard to tell what different items are, let alone what they actually do, making the player slowly hover over each individual space to try and figure it out. Loot looks too similar to resources, which can look too similar to upgrade chips, and so on. It takes a lot of effort to figure out what something is, let alone where to put it or how to use it. It’s not intuitive at all.
The onboarding isn’t great either. There is a tutorial mission, but it’s too barebones to really bring you in holistically. It really takes a few runs to start to understand not just game flow, but what it is you’re even doing, as competing systems and priorities pop up without ever really being clear how they interact.
Depending on the player, the latter could be looked at as a lack of handholding, making the player learn by doing. That is true, to an extent, but it should be limited to learning the map and diving deeper into gameplay systems.
When contract objectives aren’t clear, you end up running in circles just trying to figure out what to do. An early contract tells you to find a specific item, with the only indicator being that it’s found in common areas. After five games, I still had no idea where to find it, what it was, or how to activate it. Maybe it was bad luck, maybe it wasn’t – I couldn’t tell, because the game wasn’t entirely clear how its systems or objectives worked.
Once you start to settle in and learn by doing, Marathon really starts to click. For some, the higher barrier to entry will be enough to keep them from spending the money or time to really sink into it. For others, that more hardcore feeling, compared to a friendlier game like Arc Raiders, is exactly what they’re looking for, supported by Bungie’s ability to make shooters that really feel good to play.
It really does feel good to play. The guns each feel different, especially supported by the PS5’s Dualsense, each rattling away in different measure. They feel punchy and responsive, backed by fantastic audio design that crackles and pops with every shot.
Marathon feels like it could be something really great if it helps mitigate launch woes and criticism. Bungie has already responded that it’s aware of some of the issues mentioned here, so hopefully, we start to see improvements soon.
Marathon has all the pieces to be something really great, and Bungie is already patching to make it better.
The map design, gunplay, lore, and gameplay loop are addictive and make you want to come back, even more so as you start to unlock more companies and contracts. As you start to upgrade and learn what makes a run versus what ends one, these hooks just sink in even more.
Marathon has all the pieces it needs to be successful, with the major question being how steady new content offerings are going to be introduced. If Bungie can deliver on new maps and variations, new guns, new contracts, events, and the like, at a decent pace, then Marathon has the potential to be the type of live service hit Sony has been desperately trying to find.
If it can’t, and people bounce off due to a potentially repetitive loop, then that’s a bigger problem. Endgame has already been announced for the back half of March, so there’s hope that Bungie can and will deliver. Only time will tell, but so far, Marathon has me locked in, and I can’t wait to jump back in at launch.
Marathon is out on March 5th on PS5, Xbox Series, and Windows.
