Marathon Review

From Marathon (1994) to Marathon, with Halo and Destiny in between, Bungie continues to dominate the science fiction first-person shooter space. Marathon’s latest iteration as an extraction shooter has players enter multiplayer maps, in solos or parties, against similarly arranged players, to fulfil vendor quests and search for weapons and equipment to take home in the unlikely event they can leave the area alive. Other players are on high alert, likely eliminating you and your team on sight to steal whatever goods you have brought into the mission or looted from lethal non-player combatants that patrol high-value hot-spots. Add in Bungie’s pedigree of masterclass gunplay and movement systems built upon the backs of Halo and Destiny, and the extraction deathmatch takes on an exhilarating cadence that outperforms its genre peers while sacrificing none of the challenge or nuance.

While Marathon makes a dazzling first impression with some of the best high-contrast art direction since Mirror’s Edge, what seems familiar and knowable across the eerily deserted colony of Tau Ceti IV belies a devilishly well-considered story. Like Dark Souls, you’ll often be so consumed with looting and surviving the roaming police bots that you’ll miss the malevolent environmental storytelling in plain sight. The conventional storytelling beats found in the very impressive trailers and well-produced audio and text logs provide a baseline narrative about research and colonisation efforts on Tau Ceti IV that mysteriously saw its human population killed and spirited away under a variety of chilling circumstances that seem to have been orchestrated by rogue AI seeking godhood. Piloting one of the game’s seven cybernetic shells via an uploaded consciousness, players complete primary contracts (main quests) for the six shady factions while futility and failure haunt their every step. Whatever obliterated the colonists’ mission is aware of your scavenging on Tau Ceti’s surface, and it will seek to mess with the player’s psyche lest they figure out these mysteries and eventually take the fight to the perpetrator(s). Visual and audio glitches, unreliable narrators, and a treacherous atmosphere all make the drip-feed of Marathon’s revelations ever so effective, with the ramifications of players’ emergent narratives of survival and defeat also factoring into Bungie’s story arcs. 

The remarkable environmental anomalies are only the beginning of Tau Ceti’s mysteries

Through a densely atmospheric swamp, valley, oil-rig-looking outpost, and a maze-like walk-in refrigerator, impeccable sound and visual design pop off here both aesthetically and functionally. Players will be relying on every bit of environmental information to survive and profit. These are abandoned sites of research and experimental technologies; the only remaining inhabitants are hostile native flora and fauna, and security robots deployed to keep Company goods out of Runners’ hands. Landmarks are rich with lore and secrets that players will naturally come to glean over repeated visits. The landscapes are draped in various atmospheric effects that will affect both the Runner’s sight and abilities, with settling fog changing how longer battles play out, rain cooling down a Runner’s shell or obliterating it if it happens turns into a ‘heat cascade’ event.

In the eerie atmospheric silence of Tau Ceti IV’s abandoned locales ripe with temporal disturbances, anomalies, and alien infestations, the player will earmark every sound that makes up this game’s incredibly well-realised environmental language. You will hear turrets and poisonous plants before you see them. The cry of patrolling robots becoming alert will send shivers down your spine. The atmospheric horror that Marathon elicits will have you freeze and sweat at the mere sound of a nearby door opening that your team can’t account for, or muffled footsteps in a vent, signalling the likelihood of your imminent demise if you’re not careful. With sight and sound so strongly a part of this game’s identity, communicated clearly to the player during calm and chaos, it speaks to Bungie at the top of their artistic and technical game.

This huge, scary machine unfolds from the sky to seal off an entire area of the map. Goodies lie in wait for those who can safely breach its deadly red glow.

Some of Marathon’s iconography, mostly outside of matches, lacks the same precision and clarity. As a visual shorthand, players will see many symbol arrangements riffing on basic shapes meant to reference upgrades and certain equipment. Outside of matches, this will mean selecting an upgrade or item to view its title and definition, because the same icons can refer to different things. During a match, this means affording the time you don’t have to read through a sentence on each item of interest. Experienced players will be able to identify specific cores and implants from their titles, but never from the icons. Heck, a new player is already going to be discombobulated about the difference or necessity of these items. Some will strengthen your character, others will weaken it, and some won’t work altogether.

Marathon’s only other issue regards matchmaking. Extraction shooters in Australia have a problem with matchmaking times outside of our evening primetime hours. Even Arc Raiders suffers from occasionally lengthy queues down here, but it is less noticeable when you can tinker around in your vault and browse the vendors for the minute or two it can take for a match to come together in the slower hours. After midnight, matchmaking queues are currently two minutes at a minimum, and gradually worsen by the hour. When the thrill of loading into a map finally occurs after midnight, I am then hamstrung by a general sluggishness, a persistent red ping indicator, and infrequently, unplayable rubberbanding. I might as well not play for half of the evening with net issues ending my runs prematurely and sending me back to a matchmaking screen that can last longer than the matches. These minutes would ideally be better spent brushing up on the game’s imaginative lore via its stacked codex. Instead, Marathon’s matchmaking screen restricts players to two things: watching a moth and some caterpillars do weird stuff to electronics, and talking to the party members I brought along. No checking my factions, missions, gear, codex, or anything. 

The greatest sight a Rook can behold. So much death, so much profit.

Bungie has a very cool half-solution to the matchmaking wait times, though. Enter Rook, the most inspired addition to the solos experience in an extraction shooter. A solo-only Runner that can matchmake into an in-progress trios match. Now, matchmaking times go from instantaneous during peak times to two minutes at the absolute worst. Rook is a sneaky operator who cannot effectively contribute to progression systems like contracts and faction reputation, but is an ample scavenging rat that will loot the upgrade resources and equipment that players leave behind in a match. You are always outnumbered and outgunned due to being a flimsy, skeletal robot that not only looks like the game’s non-player UESC robots, but it can also disguise itself as such. Like a synthetic seagull in broad daylight, you can be sure to come across one of these underhanded scamps digging through a downed player’s bags. Rooks stalk teams just to scoop up their leftovers, and murk fellow Rooks for their curated haul of tat. It is ostensibly a stealthier, more calculated experience than the high-octane shootouts of Runner team fights, while existing on the periphery of those same moments. It turns Marathon’s fast-paced thrills into something more horrifying and oppressive. It is genius, but it is not Marathon’s only knockout gameplay addition to the genre.

Now for Bungie’s crowning achievement in the team-based extraction space: Cryo Archive. Set on the titular Marathon station, this expensive freezer of a map is Bungie’s extraction shooter pièce de résistance. Destiny players, imagine if the King’s Fall or Leviathan raids had several bloodthirsty parties of three simultaneously competing through the labyrinthine map’s puzzles, mobs, and bosses. But you can only participate on weekends, and entry requires you to bring your most valuable equipment to risk. The stakes are high, the ridiculous loot yields even higher, and the half-hour time limit forces a heart-pounding race right from the get-go. I have played at least 20 sessions of this now, and only made it out alive a fraction of the time. It is all I can think about. The map design is full of vents, corridors, diabolical killboxes, and plenty of item-based puzzles to lead you from one end of the gauntlet to the other, carefully weighing the consequences of every fight between you and your goal of accessing a loot room or raid mechanic. All of Marathon’s best elements are turned up to 11 in this endgame competition where only the best, sneakiest, and fastest make it out alive.

One of Cryo Archive’s major puzzles involves getting frozen in the heart of its central meatgrinder

Final Thoughts

Bungie has broken through with its pedigree for best-in-class gameplay and audiovisuals to deliver a truly unique take on the extraction shooter in a way that will require retraining and patience. Like a Souls or roguelike, it’s going to break you several times over before it can mould you. To be the best, you will risk losing the most expensive weapons and loot you have earned by taking them into the next mission. But for all it breaks you, it builds you back with gratifying rewards for every successful extract you manage to pull off. This is only the start of your story, too, as Marathon excitingly pushes its unconventional narrative into psychologically murky territory. Marathon’s visual and audio feedback feel as good, if not better, than Bungie’s other top-tier sci-fi shooters. Though matchmaking can be a wobbly slog for Australians outside of peak hours, I hope we’re given more to do during the wait times. Between the extra special twist on solos in Rook and the alluring nightmare of the Cryo Archive endgame is an incredible, hardcore competitive shooter with the smoothest of edges that is hard to shake once its virus sets in

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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