Marathon – Review
As a long-term Halo and Destiny fan with hundreds, if not thousands of hours stacked up in these Bungie games over the last 20 years. I have to admit, I found their new title Marathon, a very “challenging” game to follow… and now finally review.
Back in 2023, when the long rumoured new game from Bungie was confirmed to be an Extraction Shooter, I’ll be honest, my heart dropped. I was palpably angry at Bungie for this betrayal and trend-chasing move. This only became more entrenched over the following 2 years as I watched Destiny receive less and less effort in updates and expansions.
After the catastrophic public Marathon ‘Alpha’ in 2025 and the art plagaraism stuff, I quietly hoped that Bungie would see the light and delay everything to make something more for Halo and Destiny fans. Maybe a dedicated PvE mode, or something….anything for the “non-sweaty PvP players” to enjoy. Even a single player experience of some sort!
But no. They didn’t. They had a vision. And for reasons I could not grasp, they kept up their drive to create a live-service game for the niche audience of Extraction Shooters.
March 2026 has rolled round, and the full game launched to turmoil online. It’s online stock had certainly recovered since the terrible Alpha, but the gaming world was split on this title. People loved and hated it in equal measure and reddit was ablaze with threads for both “sides”.
For me, I had to jump into the new neon-sci-fi-shooter myself, even to just know where the developers who once kept my beloved Destiny alive, had gone too.
Turned out… Marathon was freaking amazing!
But, this is a qualified “Freaking Amazing” mind you. The shooting, the art design, the tension in each round is a special sauce which I personally grew to love. But Bungie has made a game that almost prides itself in getting in the player’s way. And unless a new player is willing to push past the 5-ish hour hump – to learn the game, to learn to be ok with loosing it all and to learn to use the very obtuse User-Interface… they will end up most certainly hating this game.
The other qualification is that Marathon is an unapologetic PvP focused Extraction Shooter, with challenging PvPvE encounters in every round. Loot can and will be lost on any given run. And on top it off, everything sits under an imposing 12 week seasonal wipe cycle, where hard earned gear, loot and player buffs are all deleted!
Losing everything in your vault is gonna be a bitter pill to swallow every 3 months.
So, what is Marathon? Well, it is not a remake of the original Bungie single-player, corridor, first person shooters of the 90s. It is a completely new beast that loosely draws on the canon and lore of the old school titles. This time, it is built around solo and teams of three loading into an arena map, to loot and complete objectives….and to hunt other players and their shit!
The unique element Bungie has bought to this extraction genre is class-based heroes, called “Shells”. Each of the 6 available shells have unique skills and perks. They include shields, rockets, invisibility, radar, drones, healing turrets and much more. So, team conformation can play a huge roll in how a battle goes.
The outlier in this line-up is the “Rook” shell. It can be used to load into an already active Trio’s map as a solo player, to quietly scavenge loot and more often than not sculk around behind teams gathering up left-overs or overlooked chests.
Rook’s game breaking ability is very different though, as he can mimic the PvE robots that occupy every map. So, a player can move around the map avoiding PvE fights, and focus on soaking up sweet loot unimpeded.
I mentioned this is a PvP focused extraction shooter, but PvE enemies are to be dismissed at your peril. They are tough, especially early on, before players have good shields and weapons that can dish out enough damage. And even then, in the top teir Map, which just unlocked, they will basically one-shot well-leveled players.
The enemies, in particular those above rank-n-file class, are really impressive to fight. I had Halo: Reach flashbacks, when invisible Elites would go inviz, flank, dodge grenades, and generally feel like they were a “thinking enemy”. It is something I have always thought Destiny lacked actaully, so it was a pleasant surprise to see it here.
The other source of death is the Maps themselves. The opening Map, Perimeter, is the intro space and is safe…except for the other players and heavy A.I enemies. But Dire March and Outpost and the just unlocked end-game zone Cryo Archive are far more hostile. Basically, if players aren’t smart, moving with care and paying attention….. everything in this game wants you dead and will chip away at your shields and health.
The moment to moment is like any other extraction Shooter. You choose a shell and load them up with what loot you want to use in the round. Or if you have “Gear-Fear”, choose a free load-out with bottom tier weapons and consumables. Then, and most importantly, you choose a faction mission or quest to do in the map… and away you go.
The shooting in this game is great. Like really, really great. It’s well tuned and has the perfect time-to kill for the mode. But so it should be, what with the Halo and Destiny pedigree under the hood. Maps and buildings are futuristic and built for chokepoints and escape routes. And the all-important faction missions create the reason to pick a fight- be it the need to extract something from a guarded computer, loot a certain thing or just kill other players.
Conflict with other players should be expected every round. This was a hard pill for me to swallow. Particularly because I had so enjoyed the co-operative under-tones that had come from playing Arc Raiders. In my first hour or so, I played a solo game, still feeling out the systems. I needed to loot a particular resource and extract with it. I loaded in and shortly after spawn, I saw a player in the distance and using “Prox-Chat” I called out to him, Arc Raiders style.
“Hey there, on your right. I’m friendly, mate. I’m just questing for some diodes”
He turned and went invisible. Moments later I was mown down in a hail of bullets. Then, as he stabbed my dying body and stole my meagre loot, I heard over prox-chat…
“This is Marathon, Bitch!”
After this, I was verrrry close to turning the game off and storming away in disgust. But for various reasons, including liking Bungie, liking the aesthetic and frankly having to play enough to review the game, I kept going. And I’m pleased I did. Now I have over 30hrs in the game and I for the most part, love it.
But…and this is a definitive “But”, as with the first 12-week wipe fast approaching and the looming shadow of all my hard-earned loot in my vault be deleted. I foresee me parking Marathon and moving on. Not for any reason except the feeling of dread of having to start all over again with the loot and faction mission grind. And most dissapointing of all, being completely disengaged from the story.
There is a traditional narrative here to experience. It’s story- if it can even be called that- is only delivered in a stilted way. Mainly, by occasional talking heads from each Faction as you complete jobs, and walls and walls of text. There are no characters to love or hate, no vinettes, no cutscenes to develop and to push me on. Nothing to spur me on to re-grind for new loot, re-grind for skills and buffs, or to go searching again for the endless new detritus needed to trade in for faction upgrades.
This game is niche. Niche as a hardcore Extraction Shooter, niche in its sci-fi art design, niche in its unapologetic focus on PvP, niche in its live-service nature and niche in its frequent seasonal wipes. I mean, even Tarkov is wiped only twice a year. When you think about it, Call of Duty was, under the hood, a yearly multi-player game focused on PvP. But they knew that it still needed a Single-Player campaign to get mainstream players to come to the yard, and I think Bungie missed an opportunity not having something similar here to break the proverbial ice.
It is a wonderful game, but it has too many “spikey bits”, to many design choices which will cause gamers to either bounce off straight away or quietly erode away due to the rough edges. Sure, there will be a hard-core fan base. Loyal lovers of everything about it, just like Tarkov and Hunt: Showdown have. Which is why I think the game has already settled at an average peak Steam player count of only 50,000 users. By comparison, Arc Raiders which is 6mths old, is still double this number. As such, I don’t think Marathon is or will be the AAA hit Bungie and Sony want or need it to be. Which is a massive shame.
Marathon is great, but it has some issues. Story and characters that are hard to engage with, looming seasonal wipes and nothing to bridge the gap to the mainstream, like a cool Single-player campaign, or an approachable PvE mode. But maybe that’s ok. A select few hard-core players will ceratinly be happy with it. I just hope the executives at Sony and the bean counters in Bungie accounting are ok with that too.
