PC Critic Reviews

Despite the tumultuous landscape of live-service games around it, Marathon firmly carves its own place in the extraction shooter genre with an unmatched presentation and breakneck rhythm.

Bungie delivers a compelling extraction shooter in a trippy new setting, though whether that will be enough remains to be seen.

At the start of its journey, Marathon is a game whose bold artistic style sometimes overshadows its best features: excellent shooting and a satisfying progression model. It is an interesting alternative in the extraction shooter genre for well-coordinated teams of three who are not afraid of brutal combat and grind. Unfortunately, the flashy, confusing interface and lack of a useful introduction to the gameplay may be enough to put some players off.

With any luck, developer Bungie will spruce up the strong foundation of Marathon to make it a bit more palatable.

Ultimately, Marathon presents itself as a kind of digital Rorschach test in which each player projects their own tolerance thresholds for frustration and aesthetic fascination: it is a work dedicated to gunplay fetishists who demand a physical response to every mouse input, and to those who, tired of the reassuring linearity of modern blockbusters, seek the thrill of fragmented and brutal storytelling. The shift toward the extraction shooter genre proves to be a bold strategic move to test the limits of competition, attracting anyone curious to see how the DNA of 1994 has mutated under Ziegler’s vision, while simultaneously forcefully repelling those who look for a guided approach or a minimalist UI. It is not a game for those who detest extraction anxiety or the permanent loss of loot, since the absence of waypoints and the informational overload of the HUD require a cognitive investment that many might find exhausting. Those with modern hardware and ultrawide displays will derive the greatest visual pleasure from this chromatic jungle, but they will still have to reckon with a system that gives nothing away and turns every mistake into a definitive erasure. Marathon, ultimately, is a technological shell that admits no compromises: either one accepts living within its distortions, or one is rejected by the system like obsolete code.

Marathon makes excellent use of Bungie's strengths, whether in its narrative, visuals, or gameplay. But despite this polished presentation, it remains a relatively conventional extraction shooter, and the few attempts to differentiate it—particularly the fast-paced and challenging combat and the hero system—fail to truly convince. There's no doubt the game will find the dedicated community it deserves for its undeniable qualities, but following the vibrant Arc Raiders unfortunately makes Marathon somewhat bland for the average player.

We tag-teamed the server slam to parse the good and the bad of Marathon's public debut, and after 10 hours of play, found it an engaging shooter with a few head-scratching elements. [Review in Progress]

We're all getting started with Bungie's extraction shooter alongside everyone else, though I do have 21 hours with this past weekend's server slam under my belt...That was enough time for me to come around on Marathon's brand of high-stakes shootouts after a pretty 'meh' first impression. I'm loving the guns (refer to our guide to the best Marathon guns for a headstart), adoring the maps, and only slightly irritated by the amount of loot juggling required. [21-Hour Impressions]

Marathon so far has been a brutal but rewarding extraction shooter that boasts an incredible visual style and is steeped in excellent Bungie gunplay. The learning curve can be steep at first, and losing everything to a bad run can sting, but the game truly opens up after a few hours to be something very addictive. Once the final map, Cryo Archive, releases in the coming days we'll have a final score for the full review. In meantime, we'll be dropping back in Tau Ceti IV chasing that next piece of loot.

While Marathon hasn’t grabbed me yet, I’m going to keep plugging away at it before bolting a score on to this review and calling it a day. There’s a lot here, most of it good, and as long as Sony backs Marathon through this teething phase I think we could have a gem on our hands – with some aggressive polishing, of course.