Marathon Review – Bungie Nails the Extraction Shooter Loop

Thirty two years. That’s how long it’s been since the release of the original Marathon, a series that, after two additional games, went into hibernation while Bungie developed the Halo series. Well, it’s finally time to return to Tau Ceti IV, and it’s no less dangerous than it was last time you were there.

Marathon is a game I was initially hesitant to go into. I’ve never been a fan of extraction shooters, as it seems to cater to the sweatiest of gamers, and this is coming from a guy who plays fighting games. The idea of playing a game where I’d always be losing my stuff just never appealed to me, and I couldn’t fathom how anyone found it fun. Egg on my face, I guess, since the more of Marathon I played, the more things started to click and the more I started having fun.

If you’re new to the genre, the basic gist is that you and your squad are dropped in a semi-open space with a handful of other teams. Your objective is to find loot, complete any quests you have, and then reach an exfil zone to get out. The rub is that there are a limited number of exfil zones, and to add on top of that, if you die, you lose everything you had. That nice shotgun with some rare attachments you grew attached to? Gone. The singular backpack you had so that you’d be able to carry an actual decent amount of loot with you? Go find another one, I guess. You simply can’t play a game like this casually, because your inventory is constantly at risk. It’s a brutal type of game that attracts a niche group of players for a reason, but I think Marathon might honestly be the one to do it best.

I’ve played a decent amount of Hunt: Showdown, Tarkov, and Arc Raiders, and don’t get me wrong, they’re neat, but neither of them hooked me the way Marathon did. The game is so smartly designed that it makes you feel like you still won something, even if you ended up dying and losing all your gear. In a genre like this (or battle royales for that matter), making it so players don’t feel like they just wasted their time is instrumental. If I spent eight hours at work, and can only spend an hour or two playing a game that night, it fucking sucks if I load into a game like this only to lose the entirety of my inventory to better players or terrible teammates. It’s clear that Bungie recognized this and smartly designed Marathon to make you feel like you’ve accomplished things more often than you haven’t.

Marathon is set a hundred years after the events of the original game, as the UESC Marathon, a colony ship, sends out a distress signal after going dark for some time. You play as a runner, a human inhabiting a cybernetic body who works for a variety of corporations and factions that all have a vested interest in discovering what happened aboard the UESC Marathon and making off with the treasures left behind. These factions are at the core of Marathon’s gameplay loop, in making sure to keep you feeling like you’re always progressing, even if you’ve died in every round you played.

Marathon features six factions you can work for: Arachne, CyberAcme, NuCaloric, Sekiguchi, Traxus, and MIDA. Each of these features a variety of contracts you can undertake to get a reputation with, which will then reward you with some story progress into how that faction operates and a supply box of guns, equipment, or upgrade materials. These contracts can vary wildly in complexity, as you’ll have one that simply wants you to smash glass in buildings, or another that might want you to inject yourself with a serum and then make it to a scanner on the other side of the map to scan your infected body for research. It’s this system that makes it so you always feel like you’re doing something important in a match, even if that match ended in your squad wiping out, because most contracts still count even if you die. And on top of that, you’ll get a bonus if you helped your teammates with their own contracts, so the game really incentivizes your team to coordinate together to finish everyone’s contract on top of hunting for loot.

Each faction features a pretty distinct personality that translates to the rewards/shop items they all can offer you as well. MIDA, for example, an anarchist group rebelling against the UESC, appropriately offers most of the explosive weaponry in the game. While NuCaloric, an agriculture company, offers more health/status recovery items and shields. As you play, you’ll gravitate more towards whichever faction encourages the type of play you enjoy, and while you can only equip one contract at a time, that doesn’t mean you’re always locked into one faction. Each faction features passive ways to increase your reputation with them. Arachne, for example, likes it when you kill or loot other players, or simply looting a weapon locker will gain you experience with Traxus. This is what I mean when I say it feels like you’re always accomplishing something in Marathon; the game respects your time in a way I haven’t really seen from other games in the genre.

I don’t normally take this long to get to how a game plays, but Marathon’s got a lot to talk about, and let’s talk about how great the game feels to play. Bungie, at this point in their career, I feel like they are unable to make a shooter control terribly; they’ve long mastered what makes a game like this feel good to play and have just gotten better at it over the years. The gunfights I’ve had with other players or simply NPC enemies in Marathon are some of the most breathtaking I’ve had in a shooter in a minute. They’re nerve-wracking and can end in an instant if you’re not careful.

Knowing what you could potentially have to deal with is tantamount to succeeding in this game, and at the top of that list is understanding each Runner shell. Marathon features seven Runner shells, synthetic bodies that you transfer your consciousness into so that you can do your dirty mercenary work on Tau Ceti IV. Think of them as your class, and if you’re coming from Destiny 2, you’ll feel right at home with how they play. The seven shells you’ll be able to use are: Assassin, Destroyer, Vandal, Triage, Recon, Thief, and Rook

Each of these feels distinct from one another, and not only is it important that you understand how to play your shell inside and out, but it’s even more important that you know how to play it better than your opponent knows how to counter it. Recon, for example, is all about playing things safe and gathering intel on the things around you. Their main ability is being able to deploy a sonar pulse that will ping enemies (players or otherwise) on your screen, but equally important are their passives that alert you when someone’s pinged you, or their ability to ping an entire squad’s location if you perform a finisher on one of their crew. A recon player isn’t likely to get in your face, not like a Destroyer would, who can whip out a full-body shield or fire homing missiles at whoever they’re targeting. But then you’ve also got more unusual classes like the Thief, who can send out a drone that can quite literally pickpocket your rarest gear from you without much fuss, robbing you of health recovery items in the middle of a fight. Each shell features a distinct way of play, and they’re all a blast to tinker around with to find which might be your favorite.

There’s a sort of rhythm you’ll get into the more you play. As you hop into a match, you’ll decide if you’re focusing on a contract or purely looting, and make your way through the map appropriately. As you carefully move through the environment, taking care to not only be aware of other players, but of the UESC forces that patrol Tau Ceti IV and are no joke themselves, you’ll be able to run into things that add some spice to a match like the sudden arrival of a boss who might have some rare loot on them or an event might take place on a portion of the map. One match had us racing to escape an area being zoned for “lockdown” as a massive ship appeared overhead and quickly lowered a cage over the area. It was a thrill to run into that event out of the blue, but it was a bigger rush knowing that with the right item, we could actually reenter that locked-down zone to find some rare gear. One thing Marathon does particularly well is managing the tension as the match goes on. With the amount of exfil zones dwindling as more teams use them to extract, you also have to contend with players who enter halfway into a match solo as a Rook: a special class built specifically around hunting for scraps and taking out tired players who might be low on resources. I especially love the Rook shell because its main focus is to loot as quickly as possible and get out. It’s great to play as, after a particularly bad run where you died and lost some supplies you really needed, especially with how powerful it can be after a few upgrades in the faction trees.

So you’ve run a couple of matches and even successfully exfiltrated with a good amount of loot a couple of times. What then? Marathon features six different upgrade trees, all tied to each of the six factions, for you to upgrade your runner. Just like how I said, increasing your rep with a faction will unlock rewards based on how you like to play. Depending on the faction, their upgrade tree shares the same philosophy. These upgrade trees feature a balance of permanent passive upgrades to your runner shells and unlocks to that faction’s armory shop. Traxus, for example, will have a wide variety of guns or attachments that you can unlock in their shop if you choose to focus on their upgrade tree, whereas CyberAcme offers things like reducing fall damage, increasing your loot speed, or adding more space to your vault. Something I particularly loved is that if you’re aiming for a particular upgrade, you can track the materials needed, and your map will tell you where you’re more likely to find them in-game. It’s just a smart quality-of-life feature that I feel like Marathon is full of.

Unfortunately, great design falls apart when you play with random folk who don’t know how to properly play the game. The more I played Marathon, the more apparent it became that a game like this just functionally doesn’t work if you’re not playing with at least one friend you can communicate with. Most of the random folk I was matched up with didn’t have mics, and god forbid they use the in-game chat or ping system to coordinate. Playing with folk you can’t communicate with is already annoying enough on Marathon’s first two maps, Perimeter and Dire Marsh, but it’s the other two when clear communication becomes critical to success. Outpost is a rainy zone with an imposing building at its center, whose gimmick involves collecting three different types of keycards not only to access the central building, where some of the game’s rarest loot hides, but also to unlock the exfil zones. If you’re not communicating as you’re looting to know who has what keycard, your team is doomed to get stuck bashing your head against a wall and likely dying. I can’t tell you how many times I’d hop on my mic or use the chat to discuss which keycards I had, only to be met with silence. Cryo Archive, Marathon’s scary endgame zone filled with puzzles and incredibly difficult enemies, feels downright impossible without a group of friends to play with. It’s a very similar issue Bungie had with Destiny, where some content was just downright unplayable if you didn’t have a dedicated group of friends to run it with. This is less a knock at Bungie, because I genuinely don’t know how you fix this sort of issue, and more of a warning to anyone interested in playing this game who doesn’t have a group of friends to play with.