It was around this time last year when Embark and Bungie both ran playtests for their new extraction shooters at the same time. Marathon’s alpha was the culmination of two years of feverish speculation about the legendary FPS studio’s first non-Destiny project in over 15 years.
Then the unexpected happened: Arc Raiders upstaged Marathon. Embark went on to release the first mainstream game of its genre while Marathon got delayed, cementing it as a fixation of skepticism for certain corners of the hobby.
My turnaround happened on day two. That was when I started to realize what sort of FPS Bungie is actually going for—an approachable, but very much lethal PvP shooter—and began to lean into that. I started running toward gunshots instead of sneaking around them. I turned on my mic, let random players fill in my crew, and finally had some great matches with the sort of intense back-and-forth fights that I recognized from Hunt: Showdown.
That’s a comparison that I expect to come back to, because I really do think Marathon’s PvP is the reason to play it. The looting, the upgrades, the cool gun mods—they’re table setting for a three-course meal of teamfights, solo scrapes, and unlikely zero-to-hero runs. And backing it up is gunplay that’s oozing the Bungie magic that I’ve truly missed.
I’ve seen some folks throw around that Marathon just feels like another hippity-hoppy Call of Duty or Apex Legends, and I wonder if we played the same game, because Marathon shells are slow, clambering creatures. Your base jogging speed has this gradual methodical thud that, unsurprisingly, has more in common with the pacing of Halo than CoD. I’m enjoying that choice for the way it generally slows down the action, but also what it does to gunfights. Where some shooters develop these calcified techniques for becoming a harder target in the middle of a shootout—sliding, jumping, rapid crouching—Marathon emphasizes positioning, timing, and stealth.
And yet, I also consider Marathon something of a movement shooter, because while your top speed isn’t very high, gravity is quite low. We might not see “schmovement” players slide-jumping around corners, but I expect plenty of movement tech to develop around precise jumps and vertical shortcuts. Meanwhile, players have already discovered that Vandal’s arm cannon doubles as a rocket jump.
I love how these guns follow recognizable, easy-to-pickup archetypes expressed through incongruous shapes. It gives even a basic pistol a striking, color coordinated DIY aura—as if it comes from a world where violence is so hyper-commodified that you can print one up in seconds.
Their memorable appearance is backed up by some of the best sound, animation, and feedback I’ve seen since, well, Halo. UESC’s robotic security troops do not just die—they erupt into flames, crumble into pieces, or get launched across a compound like an Elite stuck with a plasma grenade. Bungie has significantly upped their lethality and complexity since I last played, and while the variety of troops doesn’t rival its past work (or even Arc Raiders for that matter), they’re effective at punishing complacency and establishing a noise penalty for looting. Get into an extended scuff with the UESC and you can expect a rival crew to show up soon after.
Once I’d internalized what a good match looks like and found a handful of guns I really loved, the depth of Marathon’s progression sunk in. There are so many gun mods that range from extraordinarily lethal (like exploding bullets) to undeniably useful (kills drop ammo) to just weird (bullet impacts create “distracting bird calls”). I feel like I’m catching up on a decade’s worth of Destiny buildcrafting overnight, but the nature of extraction shooters means I can’t get too overwhelmed by options. Whatever cool stuff I find I will eventually lose, and that’s OK.
The looting, the upgrades, the cool gun mods—they’re table setting for a three-course meal of teamfights, solo scrapes, and unlikely zero-to-hero runs.
That scarcity forces me to put together offbeat builds from whatever implants and guns I have lying around the vault. Whatever my loadout ultimately looks like, there’s a comfort in knowing all of Marathon’s guns are lethal enough to drop other players quickly. Perhaps that’ll change as the community unlocks meatier shields, but I suspect high-caliber weapons will make short work of even those.
I also just learned more by playing. Those early economy concerns? They all pretty much evaporated after I spent enough time with Marathon’s vendors to learn how the barter system works. Essentially, there’s a way to easily trade common salvage for all of your basic consumables (medkits, shield charges, ammo) instead of laying down credits. Once I knew that I could never have enough biomass or unstable gunmetal, and mentally noted a few locations to find a ton of it, I was rolling with more patch kits than I knew what to do with.
Alright Bungie, you got your hooks in. I’m excited to play a lot more Marathon. The full version has a third map (Outpost) that I’ve never touched, a sixth runner shell, and supposedly guns that weren’t available in the server slam. But I’m most curious about the Cryo Archive: a post-game map coming later this month that players suspect will be shaped like a Destiny raid. I’m in.
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