Marathon (2026)

I think I really like this game?

I've been playing this on my PS5.

Marathon is... interesting. It's Bungie's newest shooter, based on one of their older franchises, but it's part of a somewhat recent genre that seems almost deliberately harsh. If you weren't aware, this is known as an "extraction shooter", a genre that lies somewhere between a battle-royale and a competitive roguelike, where you go into dangerous maps with the goal of looting the place while you're there, but anything you find (or take in with you) only leaves with you if you manage to get out alive. It's a game where you're either constantly outmatched or you're risking losing something that took real time to get, and it's a certain kind of stressful that I don't always love.

The thing is, it's also very fun. This is a Bungie game and they know a thing or two when it comes to making first-person shooters. I really enjoyed what I played of Destiny and Destiny 2 (until they took away content I paid for, but that's a rant for another day) and the Halo games are, well, the Halo games. Everyone knows that Bungie can make a good shooter, so why was I so surprised that they managed to do it again? This game plays wonderfully. 

I'm sure I'm doing you a disservice by not properly articulating the specifics of what I mean, but I'll try. This game, like many of Bungie's others, simply has a great gamefeel to it. There's a satisfying "pop" to headshots, a nice hitsound/hitmarker when you shoot an enemy, a skull flashes on the UI when you get a kill, and the guns all look and sound pretty good. Something like this can be hard to put into words, but taken in total it just feels good to shoot robots (or other players) with these sci-fi guns.

There are loads of cosmetics to collect and weapon skins to unlock, and while most of the guns all share a similar aesthetic and, to my eye at least, look kind of the same, it's a cohesive look and, well, a fairly unique one. The guns, environments, and just about everything you'll see have a geometric, almost flat-shaded look with bold and heavily-saturated colors. When there is text, it's typically fairly blocky and aliased, giving the entire game a sort of faux-low-res vibe that I think really makes it stand out from its competition.

The extraction-shooter space is one that seems largely defined by the modern-military-shooter, by the likes of Escape From Tarkov, and while Arc Raiders and The Hunt: Showdown differ from that, Marathon's aesthetic, to me at least, is far more appealing than even those. This is a beautiful game and even after over a dozen hours with it I'm still occasionally stopping to take in the scenery. Granted, it seems like Bungie initially stole this visual style at least partially from an artist without properly crediting them, but given that they've seemingly mended that relationship and come to some sort of agreement, I'm going to try to see that as water under the bridge.

Of course, it's got an 0451 in it.

I've mentioned it a few times, but this is an "extraction shooter" and as such it can feel incredibly punishing. The general structure of it is this: you'll be in menus organizing the gear you've already attained or chosen to purchase, then you'll queue up for a mission with whatever gear you've decided to take with you, then you'll be in the game and shooting and looting your way across the map, and then one of two things happens. You'll either extract from the mission and add your newfound items to your vault, or you'll get killed before that can happen. If you fail, you'll lose whatever you decided to take with you on that mission as well as whatever you just looted.

While some games leave you with a feeling that failures can be learned from, that every loss is a chance to grow, sometimes the odds are simply against you and you'll die due to an unfortunate starting spawn, or an enemy camping an objective, or a sniper across the map, and your death won't seem earned. Ultimately, death is cheap in this game and you'll need to come to terms with that. You can't get too precious with your gear or care too much about any given run because, well, sometimes there just wasn't anything you could've done to prevent a failure and that can be a hard thing to internalize. 

You'll be seeing this screen a lot.

I've been trying to make my peace with it, but the competitive part of me and the part of me that wants to, you know, make consistent progress, get frustrated. There are certain things that help mitigate this such as quests that you can make progress in independently of exfilling a map and a persistent character that you're able to slowly upgrade over the course of a season (I'll get to that later) but, in my time with it at least, you'll still always be failing sometimes. This is described as a PVPVE game, and that's ultimately the case. While I may wish it leaned more on PVE than PVP, other players will always be a random factor in the mix and those other player will, in 99% of cases, be hostile.

Occasionally you'll run into a player who doesn't shoot you on first sight; someone who'll use a voice-line (or their actual voice) to try to make peace with you, but in my experience these are the exception and you're better off, unfortunately, being the one to start fights. This is the Prisoner's Dilemma in action. Yes, the game world theoretically supports cooperation and you can imagine a situation where everyone works together to fulfill their objectives before leaving the map without any human-on-human bloodshed, but in practice you just have to assume everyone else is out to get you, because they probably are. The game rewards PVP, it rewards certain specific cruel actions with challenges and cosmetics, and there's no in-game penalty for breaking a truce or shooting-first.

I, myself, try to view this as a battle-royale where I can sometimes go in with better-than-starting gear. Cooperation (outside of my squad) isn't on my mind because, well, I've been shot down pretty much every time I've attempted to barter with other players. For a lot of people that open-hostility is the draw; the idea that the world is out to get you so it's up to you (and your friends) to get one over on the world. It's a compelling premise and as this is my only firsthand exposure to the genre it's one I'm starting to see the appeal of.

Uneasy truces like this one are rare.

Unfortunately, this game also seems to be taking the progression-wipes of Tarkov as an inspiration for their "Seasons". That game, if you weren't aware, would periodically "wipe" each player's progress when major updates would happen, effectively restoring every player back to square-one on a semi-regular cadence. I've been told that's no longer the case (apparently, progress is progress now) but Marathon is, at this point at least, going to be resetting character upgrades when the second "season" starts and I honestly don't know whether I'll have it in me to go through all this rigamarole again. It's been enjoyable building reputation with factions and slowly building up my stats over time, but will I want to do that again? And again? I don't know, and I honestly severely doubt it.

Those upgrades are ultimately one of the major mitigating factors in my wanting to continue playing the game. Whenever a failure hits particularly hard or a piece of gear I'd grown attached to gets lost after a death, I'm able to take some solace in the fact that I at least made progress on a quest, or earned some credits, or at least have something in my vault or character I can fall back on. Starting from zero in a few months sounds... well, it sounds kind of scummy in a player-retention sort of way. I get that this is a live-service game that Sony will (ideally) want to support for the foreseeable future and permanent upgrades could potentially get in the way of making that feasible, but for me that's not a bad thing. It's okay to max out something and simply be done with it. The game here is strong enough that I think I'd want to keep playing with my upgraded character because I like playing the game.

Losing things after a match is punishing enough.

There's more to this game that I haven't even touched on such as the incredibly stylish cutscenes for each of the factions or the copious amounts of lore documents to read, but I feel I've taken up enough of your time already. This is a very fun game that I'm having a good time with at the moment and while I'm not sure if I'll stick with it once some changes hit in a few months, I think that's okay. Not everything needs to be a forever game for me, and for now I'm willing to just accept the game as it is. It is very nice to look at, after all.