Marathon first impressions for PC, PlayStation, Xbox

Marathon is finally out after much discussion and broad concern from the gaming community. It’s been the subject of a lot of conversation since it’s initial announcement, and even already had its share of controversy before it was ever even released. Marathon has been gearing up to drop something that nobody had any certainty if they were going to love or hate. It’s from Bungie, for god’s sake: creator of multiple long-beloved game franchises at this point. Ebbs and flows in opinions on handling a live service with Destiny withheld, this is a developer that knows what they’re doing and carries a lot of anticipation for anything new they’re going to throw out there. So when they come out and tell us they’re making an extraction shooter of all things; one of the most contentious game genres there is; it’s cause for conflicted feelings before ever even seeing anything. Players that prefer PVE will tell you that it is a genre that is too hostile for them to enjoy. But… Arc Raiders recently proved it can appeal to the casual audience half a year ago. Strict PVP FPS players will tell you that the extraction shooter genre is too slow or that losing a fight making you lose everything is painfully annoying to feel like coming back in at a disadvantage. Now that’s where Marathon comes in.

Marathon, as I would call it, is the Yin to Arc Raiders’ Yang. If Arc Raiders was the one to prove that a AAA quality extraction shooter could appeal to casual players that enjoy PVE and slightly spicy co-operation with the thrill of the odd betrayal, Marathon is the one to prove that a AAA quality extraction shooter can appeal to the PVP crowd. This is the hostile extraction shooter. In Marathon, there is little incentive to ever let your fellow players live. You should shoot them on sight. There are quest objectives focused on killing others, and the game shows you kill numbers as the first stat every time you exit a world (whether that be willingly or not). If you don’t want to have PvP at the forefront of any interaction, then Marathon is not the right choice for you.

Likewise, in continued offering of how Marathon really shows the other side of extraction shooters: in my experience, there is just not much need to worry about the loot you’re finding. You want to have ammo, healing items, and guns first and foremost. Upgrade items like shields, attachments, throwables, cores, and implants take the second priority, and last up in importance is anything else you can carry in order of highest value. Chaff items seemingly exist in Marathon solely to get you money on exfil for no reason other than to be able to buy upgrades and more gear for when you inevitably die in the future. Not that the loss of your items matters much anyway; Marathon is all too willing to fill you out with a free kit when you are eliminated, consisting of just enough to have no problems getting more. Sure, the guns are basic and the healing items included are weak, but with such a fast TTK (Time to kill), there’s little reason to be bothered by these things. There’s even incentives to not bring your own stuff by way of gaining reputation with the various factions by taking their sponsored kits into battle.

The guns all feel really good and unique between each other, perhaps to an extent that I can only credit Bungie in the past for having done with the Halo games. There are several categories of weapons and while you can stick with the familiarity of ballistic weapons, don’t miss out on the interesting variety offered by the volt weapons in Marathon. The game’s aesthetics lend itself well to creating wildly off-the-wall concepts and put them into practice. With Marathon taking place in a far futuristic dystopian future at the point where people are consciously running in robot bodies, there are few lengths that would be a stretch of imagination, and Marathon takes full liberty with that in weapon designs. Every gun feels like it has its own pros and cons, and nothing in my time thus far has felt exceptionally better or worse than the other in a general sense. The free kits also give you pretty good weapons, so you’re rarely running with anything weak.

Fights are generally over pretty quickly, as mentioned above, thanks to the fast TTK offered in Marathon. Generally, it feels like the combat is fun when it’s happening, and getting into gunfights is definitely one of the primary things you’re expected and will likely want to do while playing. NPCs litter each map, which are all generally pretty populated. Map sizes are tightly designed, with little dead space, so there’s almost always someone likely nearby. NPCs seem to serve primarily as obstacles, whose purpose is to waste your ammo and expose your position. Gunshots are audible from quite far, and getting third-partied is a constant in Marathon. That is, if you start firing shots, you can assume pretty reliably that someone heard those shots and is coming your way. In a way, this fact almost feels a bit oppressive, dis-incentivizing you from engaging NPCs at all for fear of being shot in the back by surprise, but as long as you’re operating with that knowledge, I’ve found the tension keeps up well in operation. Just watch out for the random claymores that seem to be scattered about the map with little expectation.

I do want to lobby one complaint on the NPCs in Marathon: the way that the humanoid enemies move and fight just… feels wrong in the setting. You can tell this is a Bungie game, because just like in Halo or Destiny before, all enemies casually side strafe and hip fire at you constantly. I think this style of AI works to feel right when there are more enemies on the screen like in the two previously mentioned games, but feels oddly out of place when you’re only fighting 1-3 enemies at a time. This is a minor complaint overall, since the NPCs are kind of secondary to the players, but I did notice this immediately and thought it felt odd.

The aesthetic is where Marathon really puts itself out there. The visuals are honestly nothing short of shocking. That can be a good or a bad thing, depending on your view, but you’d be hard-pressed to not call it stylish and unique. Almost offensively bright and vibrant colors splash the palette of Marathon at every turn. Every menu, every structure, every gun and character, there is not much that isn’t coated in the most strikingly vibrant paint possible, and it works for Marathon to create something you don’t see often. This visual slap in the face offered even extends past just the color palette, as I just have to say, these loading screens.. what is happening here? The loading screens are all uncomforting, hyper-defined shots of moths doing… something. By something I mean: I have no idea what they’re doing, but it’s creepy and weird looking as they’re crawling about a facial-looking mask of some sort. It’s hard to describe and you’d just have to see it, but believe me, it’s really weird every single time and it definitely catches the attention. If not that, then you’re shown the moths eating oddly wet and juicy looking (synthetic?) worms. Yes, it’s just as gross as it sounds. I honestly am not sure what these add to the game, and kind of wish it weren’t so oddly intimate with the shots on these moths, but, it is definitely worth noting.

To be honest, the UI in general is pretty chaotic, and… while I do think it can be viewed as “bad”, I personally think it lends itself well to the style of the rest of Marathon. Corporate entities over-manufacturing and warring with each other in almost propagandic commercials that you get to catch glimpses of as you level up through the factions almost creates the same visuals you get out of the rest of the game’s UI structure. I wish it were a bit easier to keep up with all the chains to follow through, but I do actually think it’s a really neat manifestation of the presentation you’d get from having to deal with overbearing corporate meddling. I could be wrong and just making up excuses for bad UI design, but once I got used to where things were, I don’t feel like it’s quite as confusing as it initially felt. The only thing I’d note is that there are definitely some unnecessary redundancies that they could cut down a bit. Like how you have both a “loadout” and “vault” tab, when loadout is effectively nothing but a cutdown view of the vault. The shell select screen could just as easily show the stats shown on the loadout screen and remove that one entirely. Likewise with the factions menu, there’s an extra buffer layer where you have to click which one you’d like, but then after clicking, there is a selection still always active at the top of the screen to quickly jump between them. This could just skip straight to this screen to cut out unnecessary extras. But I digress, it is not all that bad, and you’ll get used to it quickly. It’s a far cry more engaging and interesting than the hulu menus half of every other FPS on the market has taken to, so if we at least get to avoid that, I’m happy.

Before I close out, I want to include the thoughts from a good friend of mine, who has been playing with me. I consider him a Bungie knowledge bank and a Destiny addict, so I wanted to get his thoughts.

Here’s what he had to say:

“The game is definitely a new take from Bungie, but it is not hard to see classic Bungie trademarks in it. And that really shouldn’t be too big of a surprise, Marathon is technically not a new series, even if the last prior to this is approaching its 30th birthday this year. It does however feel quite far from the series roots, with the aesthetic of new Marathon being bold, starkly different from the relatively more reserved design language of classic Marathon. On the other hand, it feels like the game shares a lot of its DNA with Destiny. This also shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, given the studio has been primarily focused on the Destiny franchise for more than a decade prior to this game. There are moments playing Marathon where I feel almost a weird sense of familiarity with elements of the game that I’ve only just encountered for the first time. Picking up a new weapon, the aesthetics may be vastly different from anything I’ve ever seen from Destiny, but firing it will feel familiar. The feeling of deja vu this game gives me extends to multiple areas, and can even be a bit frustrating at moments where things behave differently from Destiny.”

“Navigating the menus, for example, is remarkably similar to those in Destiny 2, with the exception of drop down menus, which behave differently, causing me frequent mistakes when I encounter them. Overall though, there is a part of me that feels like I need to compare Marathon to a match of Destiny’s Trials of Osiris, transplanted into one of Destiny’s many patrol zones, but with a heavy overhaul in design language. It does make me feel a bit out of place, however, as the focus on PvP in Marathon makes it starkly different from much of what I’ve enjoyed from Bungie’s history. It is in a sense similar to seeing Taco Bell’s move to selling chicken nuggets and fries. They may be good in their own right, the seasonings may be familiar to my palate, and many people may even be excited to see them go this bold new direction. but it is strange to see, may not appeal to everyone, and honestly not where I would typically go when craving those items. At the end of the day, I can say that I do wish to see more of Marathon’s world, but I also wish that I didn’t have to play strictly competitively to experience it.”

I think Marathon is launching to better reception than many expected and while I don’t think it’s going to become the next big thing, I do appreciate what it’s offering and hope to at least see that it captures an audience since it’s offering an experience otherwise underserved in the FPS space. Other extraction shooters like Tarkov might be more “hardcore”, but none of them that I’ve interacted with thus far captured the feeling of a competitive PVP interaction more than Marathon is offering. It might take an hour or two to get your framing right for how to enjoy Marathon, but once you realize the loot doesn’t matter and the objectives are your primary purpose, hopefully you’ll find yourself like I did and come to appreciate it a bit more. I definitely struggled to find “the point” at first, but I’ve come around and think I finally get it. Marathon is definitely a good game, even if not a game for everyone, or even most people.

Note: Bungie provided us with Marathon PC codes for review purposes.