Marathon Review In-Progress – 2 Games in 1, and Neither are ARC Raiders

For the first time in nearly a decade, there’s a new Bungie game to play. Technically, it’s an old Bungie series rebooted, but for a lot of Bungie fans (myself included), Marathon was not the series that introduced me to the storied developer.

Halo was, of course, my introduction to Bungie games, followed by a deep foray into the first Destiny game and a waxing and waning interest in Destiny 2, which has amounted to over 60 hours with the game across its expansions and my multiple attempts to get deep into it, each of them thwarted by all the regular reasons Destiny is nigh impenetrable to new comers or lapsed players.

I have immense respect for what Bungie has accomplished as a studio in its time. I mean, how could you not? This is the studio that reinvented the shooter landscape in video games and brought about the explosion of the FPS genre on consoles. Bungie’s history is integral to anyone who cares to understand the video game industry today, and if you don’t respect or value that, then you’ve either forgotten the weight of what that felt like when Halo first launched, or you’re too young to remember it.

And yet, even with all of that understanding as part of my own personal history with Bungie, it took me right up until playing the Server Slam to really be excited for Marathon. In fairness, I’m new to extraction shooters. I’ve spent upwards of 55 hours in ARC Raiders, and that’s been the first time I really dug into the genre. I’ve had passing experience with previous extraction shooters, but it’s a genre I’ve been largely unfamiliar with, and I’d even hesitate to say I’m familiar with it on a whole after only having spent significant time with ARC Raiders and now Marathon.

That unfamiliarity, mixed with a waning interest in Destiny and the myriad of issues that have plagued Bungie as we’ve approached Marathon’s launch (layoffs, executive greed, plagiarism scandal, etc.), all made me very disinterested in Marathon right up until the end. Maybe that long stretch of feeling like I couldn’t care less about the shooter is part of why I’m so high on it now, because now, at least for the foreseeable future, I can’t think of another game I’d rather spend my nights playing.

I’m all-in, obsessed with Marathon and its two-games-in-one experience split between whether you go on a solo run versus running with a group.

NOTE: This is a review in progress; there will not be a score at the end of the review, though it will be updated with a score once the Cryo Archive endgame map is live and I’ve had the chance to play it.

Marathon The Stealth Horror Game

This is the first part of what I mean when I say Marathon is two games in one, and neither of them is ARC Raiders. First, the solo experience, which to me has felt like one of the best stealth experiences I’ve had in video games, with the addendum that it’s also a stealth horror experience, as Kotaku’s Zack Zwiezen pointed out to me during a match.

Marathon takes place on Tau Ceti IV, a distant planet once thought to be a potential new home for humanity as Earth’s resources continued to dwindle. Corporations sent thousands of colonists in a massive ship called the Marathon, which went silent shortly after its departure. After a hundred years, it relayed a single message “Somewhere in the heavens, they are waiting.”

What follows is how you arrive there, as a consciousness installed into a hollow Runner Shell. A cybernetic body frame that can die and be destroyed, but can be reprinted with your consciousness reinstalled in the new, fresh body. Your Runner Shell represents one of the seven classes you can play as, with each consciousness having been sent by the giant, AI-powered corporations that stand as the world’s superpowers.

You’re made to be disposable. Tossed onto a hostile planet, with creatures and fauna that will kill you if you’re not careful, and a robot army that will still kill you even if you are careful. The United Earth Space Council (UESC) is the corporation behind the robots, and they are relentless in their efforts to seemingly cover up what happened on Tau Ceti IV, what happened with the Marathon colony ship, and in the midst of it all, Tau Ceti IV is one of the most rich and atmospherically dense environments Bungie has created in a long time.

Running into all of this solo, even when it’s bright and sunny on any of the three maps you have access to (Perimeter, Dire Marsh, Outpost), is a tense experience. Add to that the fact that you lose all of the gear you bring with you when you die, and it’s easy to see how games can get incredibly tense. That’s why it can feel like a horror game. All you can do as a solo player is sneak around to try and survive. Any excessive noise will draw other players to you, and if you don’t keep a keen eye, other players will easily get the jump on you and take you down.

Being a solo player in Marathon is a grind. It’s putting the game on its highest difficulty setting even when heading to low-danger maps like Perimeter. It’s the version of the game that still manages to raise the stakes and tension even when you’re loading in with a free Sponsored kit. Even more so when you’re a Rook among full three-player squads and not just a solo player fighting other solo players.

The much-debated TTK (time-to-kill) also plays a factor here. Personally, I think the TTK is exactly where it should be. You should be on your toes at all times, especially as a solo player. The shorter TTK also shows how important your gear is. I’ve won fights where another player had the jump on me and lost fights where it was the other way around. Better gear, and ultimately, better play, is what makes or breaks your runs.

It also teaches you to really fear the UESC. These are not enemies you can play around with, and trying to take down three or four of them at once can easily turn on you if you’re not carefully taking cover and healing. They’ll even push you and force you out of safety, and dying to them feels so bad you’ll be terrified of it happening again.

Playing solo also really gives you the chance to soak in Tau Ceti IV and really investigate the different elements of environmental storytelling that fill in every nook and cranny. Though I think several of its buildings look far too similar, and that their similarity plays a significant factor in how completing some of the Contracts can get more confusing than they should be, Marathon’s environmental design is overall excellent. Bungie goes to great lengths to separate Marathon from the swath of live service shooters on the market, and absolutely succeeds.

Complete with random teammates who will run forward across the map without communicating, spread out to try and lone-wolf every squad you come across by themselves and put the rest of your squad at risk, playing Marathon in a group is almost an entirely different experience when playing solo.

It’s faster, it gets you into the action sooner, and much more chaotic. I’m also calling it Apex-like because as someone who has well over 1,200 hours in Apex Legends, I can’t help but see similarities in each of the Runner Shells with some of the most iconic Legends. Vandal = Octane, Thief = Pathfinder, Assassin = Wraith, Destroyer = Gibraltar, Recon = Bloodhound, and Triage = Lifeline.

You can still have tense matches when you’re running with a squad in Marathon where you don’t see many (or any) real players, and spend your time with a head on a swivel for other squads, only to run into UESC bots. Which, again, are extremely dangerous in their own right (even after the recent patch) especially when you start having to explore the third map, Outpost, which is the most dangerous of the three introductory maps.

Weaving your way through each match around your and your teammates’ Contracts also drives the ‘infil, loot, fight, exfil’ gameplay loop in an interesting way, especially when you’re in a squad that is actually working together, and isn’t acting like the squad I described at the top of this section.

Properly communicating with your teammates further supports my two-games-in-one outlook. It’s not a surprise that actually getting on the mic and working with your squad members offers a vastly different experience, but this is also where you get to see the lighter side of Marathon.

Yes, it always sucks to lose a good loadout when you die, but running with other people, and specifically running with the same squad that you’re communicating with, will show you how generous Bungie is when it comes to the rewards and gear you’ll earn through gameplay.

Completing Contracts and working through objectives with your teammates will get you through levels far faster than you could on your own, and the gear you lost will quickly be replaced with new gear, encouraging you to experiment and try different approaches as you build back towards that threshold you had when you lost that first ‘good loadout.’ Climbing back to the quality of loot you had before you died in a bad round feels better than maintaining that gear for multiple runs.

That’s the gameplay loop that lets me keep my head up when I don’t make it out of a run, and it’s also what has made me stop worrying about all my loot getting reset at the start of each new season. I know I’m going to have more fun getting back there, and maybe even going a little further. Your end goal in Marathon isn’t better loot, it’s a better gameplay experience with each new run, and that’s a loop I could run on for a long, long time.

It’s Not a Sprint, It’s a…

I think it’s fairly clear at this point that I’m pretty Marathon-pilled. I genuinely love this game, and like a lot of players who find themselves unable to stop playing, I also can’t stop thinking about it to the point where I’m even dreaming about it.

All that said, Marathon is by no means perfect, and comes with its fair share of Bungie obtuseness that I fear will hamper newcomers in the same way Destiny now feels impenetrable to me. For one thing, there’s still a lot that I’m learning about the game with each session. Like how you can sprint for longer when running in the water or while it’s raining, because your Shell will generate less heat while its cooled by the water. Or how collecting items that are related to certain factions will earn you XP for that faction, even when you’re not doing a Contract from that faction.

There’s a lot about Marathon that doesn’t get explained well, even after taking the time to read and re-read the ‘Help’ pages that are available in each menu screen when you’re in the lobby. Speaking of the menus, while I don’t have as many in-game issues with Marathon’s UI compared to what I’ve seen players complain about online, I do have a lot of problems with its menus and icons.

Scrolling through the six Factions and moving between their multiple Contracts could also be a lot smoother, and though I think its method of tracking resources for you to keep an eye out for is actually fairly streamlined, it would be nice to know

Weapon mod icons are particularly difficult to parse, and some of them will have the exact same name but do different things. Some will have the same effect but have different stats, despite being the same gear tier. The mods you can add to your Shell are somewhat better, because you quickly learn to spot whether it’s marked as a mod for your Shell’s head, torso, or legs, based on which part of the tiny figure is coloured in.

But there’s no way for you to compare them on the fly, there’s no way for you to batch and see which are exact copies and which have slight differences, and these are just the issues I have that make managing your Vault an overly tedious effort. And none of this is helped by the fact that you can’t adjust your cursor speed, so it always feels like it is slow as molasses when moving from one item to the next.

When it comes to the in-game UI, my main issue is that you can’t zoom in on the map to try and be more discerning with which buildings you’re trying to ping. It feels like such a commonplace feature that it’s more odd than upsetting to see it absent here. I would also appreciate a clearer indication that I’ve downed another player, instead of trying to pay attention to the text that appears on the left side of your screen to indicate when you’ve downed someone.

With all of that said, these are all things that can be changed. Bungie has already changed elements I would’ve called out if not for the team being very responsive with its first patch, like how objectives will now appear on your screen when you’re within 20 meters of them instead of 10.

No game is perfect out of the gate, and Marathon certainly isn’t, but it is such a well-made game that I’m finding my biggest problems to be nitpicks that in today’s industry could very well be removed with a patch somewhere down the line.

This Ain’t ARC Raiders

‘This ain’t ARC Raiders’ has become a popular refrain for players to speak into the proximity chat as they finish off another player. I’ve done it myself to someone who called me a few unsavoury names as I killed them, took their gear, and took the exfil they had activated. It gives me a good laugh, and it’s also a case of ‘it’s funny because it’s true.’

Marathon is not ARC Raiders. It’s something more, and for my money, something better. Beyond my own preferences of liking first-person shooters over third-person, Bungie has created a more interesting, rich world with Marathon that I can’t stop thinking about. The gameplay loop feels tense and more exciting in ways I find more interesting than how I feel when running Topside in ARC Raiders.

That comes from the more PvP-focused, hostile environment; it comes from how good every gun and piece of gear feels to use, how each Runner Shell feels unique and familiar at the same time. It absolutely comes from the art design that is leagues above what I’ve seen in any multiplayer game thus far, even surpassing what Bungie has done in the past with Destiny.

Marathon is a challenging, thrilling, horrifying, stunning, beautiful game that has wormed its way into my brain and will likely remain nestled there for a long time. It is exciting to see Bungie back in full force here, with confident gameplay and artistic choices that all come together to form what is easily one of the most intriguing games in the multiplayer genre yet.

As noted earlier, this review will not have a score placed on it until I’ve played through the Cryo Archive map. It’s described as an ‘endgame’ area, so even after playing 32 hours (and climbing), in the same way I wouldn’t feel comfortable giving a game a score before I hit credits, I want to wait to hit the initial version of Marathon’s endgame.

If it sticks to what I’ve felt while playing Marathon, which, again, is the feeling that my ultimate goal isn’t to bring home better loot, but to have a better experience with each new run, then it’ll only solidify what I already believe to be one of the best games of 2026.

PS5 version tested. Review code provided by the publisher.

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