Marathon

Bungie is back: Marathon drips the FPS mastery and environmental design class of the Destiny maker and Sony subsidiary from every pore. Starting Marathon is a visual feast: From the visualised lore of runners being silk-woven shells for uploaded consciences to the faction designs reminiscent of the original Marathon game from 1994 (and a cameo from Oni). The opulence is almost enough to savour Marathon as a work of art.

It is, however, also what makes the first entry into Marathon confusing, because none of the game menus, from loadout customisation to faction quest acceptance to actually starting the game, adhere to any genre conventions, be they from online shooters or the extraction genre in particular. Even on console, Marathon utilises a cursor like on PC (as did Destiny 2 before), and menus are strewn all over the screen, sometimes in several of their own sub-menus: factions and the battle pass to the left, loadouts above (but you can also hit L2), skills hidden in the menu of every faction, settings to the bottom right of the start screen. Understanding Marathon’s UI is a tiresome affair, and would have benefitted greatly at least from the omission of the cursor on consoles.

Nevertheless, when finally in the game, the gun and movement feel of Marathon is second to none. Players enter the world of Marathon in groups of three, try to collect loot and solve small faction quests one task per run, and then exfil back to keep their loot. Anything you bring into the zone makes you better equipped, but is also in danger: Be killed, and everything is gone. To start out again and again, the factions provide you with very small kits of equipment: A gun, a bit of ammo and two or three health or shield packs. To bring more, you have to sacrifice your own equipment, which you can either buy with the credits you find and earn from the factions or loot directly and bring back home.

The problem with this is that the system is quite unforgivable. Bungie proudly tells players in the startup notes that they will not find much ammunition and healing equipment in the run. But money is also sparse, and badly needed for the upgrades of different factions. This friction is supposed to bring tension, but so far it appears it mostly brings frustration. Especially ending up without ammunition shouldn’t happen in the frequency it does. Yes, preparing for a run is part of the game, and can be part of the fun for players who enjoy the extraction game loop, but having to consciously prepare, buy and equip the most basic necessity to even play the game every run is not friction, it is tedium. It brings people to stop playing the game, if they do not enter it completely sure they love this mechanical loop.

That combines with the one thing that does not feel good in the overall gameplay: looting boxes happens on a timer. When players open a box, a loading animation has to identify every item in the box individually before it can be looted. This, too, is supposed to create tension, and make you loot only when you are sure you are completely safe. But when one of the first upgrades you can buy reduces these loading times, why include them at all? It makes both the upgrade and the mechanic feel meaningless.

I am aware that many of these problems I encountered are inherent to the extraction game genre, and wanted by people who like Arc Raiders or Escape from Tarkov. I do believe they betray the inherent flaws of the genre however: There is no way to relish in the outstanding shooting Bungie delivers for me here, because any encounter could be my last in any round, be it robots or players, and any missed shot is one step further to being left without a means to even play the game in any given round. Marathon so far does not provide a training mode, or any kind of singleplayer content. I’d wager the game experience would massively improve from letting me infiltrate the first map, Perimeter, all alone without other players, to learn the geometry, find some basic loot and enjoy shooting a few robots, which are in itself challenging enough to make a game out of it. Personally, I’d love to see Bungie even add entirely new modes that ditch the extraction friction loop, such as classic PvP deathmatch mechanics or something akin to Destiny 2’s Crucible game modes. Bungie’s gameplay qualities are enough to encompass more than one FPS game mode, and Marathon’s long-time staying power would profit for it, I am sure.

So for now, Marathon is an unfinished game: Sony says so, and asks reviewers to hold their final verdict until the endgame map drops at the end of March. Outlets naturally comply, and whether that is an ideal situation for players, outlets or Bungie is another discussion. But like the game’s current state, this impression here is only a snapshot of the experience: One that leaves me wanting for more Marathon, hoping that it comes in a different serving format than the Marathon that currently exists. We’ll see if the upcoming changes make extracting more palatable to bypassers like me, or if the game will lock into hardcore fans that surely already find much to love about Marathon.