Marathon Review

It's pretty good.

3/30/2026 · 8.6/10

Gameplay Loop

Marathon hands down has amazing gunplay, which is to be expected of any Bungie title. It feels great to move around and control your character. The game provides plenty of movement possibilities depending on the Shell you play.

The most mobile Shells are Thief, Vandal, and Destroyer. Thief has a grapple hook, Vandal has a double jump and super slide, and Destroyer has a super sprint and jet dash. Each one has their own way of staying fast and traversing the map.

The other Shells have less movement and lean more into utility-focused options. Assassin brings smokes and invisibility, Triage brings healing, and Recon brings radar and an explosive drone. All of the Shells feel useful, even if there is balancing that should still be considered.

The Shells can all be improved by progressing through the several faction skill trees, which give upgrades both in and out of runs. You can unlock improvements to stats, and access better options through armory vendors.

The game has missions in the form of Contracts. You may only have one active at a time, and upon completing them you get a faction experience boost, and may even unlock a specific purchase in the armory. The Contracts are a great way to make players cross paths in dynamic ways, but they can also be far too punishing and monotonous.

Some requirements are brutal, like needing to complete every step in a single run, or having to exfil after finishing the objective. You are definitely going to experience someone killing you one second before completing a long mission at least once in your time playing.

Despite this, I have had a ton of fun in the game, and the truly hard missions are reserved for later. The unlocks they give are also not always the most important. While they can give you a slight edge, a lot of the gear you can get in the armory can also be found naturally through drops.

Realistically, everything besides the main CyberAcme faction is not required to perform well. The other factions just give you a decent, and sometimes substantial, leg up on people. Yet there is always room for a free kit to slay a god.

The maps are fun and unique, with different amounts of teams dropping in depending on the location. I think that is genius, because it lets some maps feel larger scale than others, while keeping the pacing tight.

There is one additional thing to focus on that is quite substantial: the map called Cryo Archive. It is one of the most intense and exciting maps I have played in a long time. It is truly massive, and foreboding when you first enter.

It features seven vaults that can only be accessed with keys, which you can find by looting them in the other maps, or by killing players that brought them in. There are secrets and puzzles that many players may never experience, which adds a level of wonder and prestige to the map.

The biggest thing to conquer is the boss, the Compiler. A truly herculean task, because in order to even attempt it you must complete every other vault beforehand, which is no simple feat on its own.

First you must loot a key, then make it to the vault after entering the archive, all while fighting off hordes of AI and heavily equipped players. Only then, after finishing six of those vaults, you must do it once more while pursuing the Compiler. Then of course you have to beat the Compiler with whatever loot and resources you have left.

The likelihood of even ten percent of the player base completing such a task is extremely low, but part of me likes that. It makes the raid feel like an epic undertaking.

In games like Destiny, some raids can be solo cleared after a certain period, usually with exploits, but it still diminishes the cool factor. Cryo Archive avoids that. The fact that other players are in the raid means you always have to be on your A game, even if you know the optimal route.

Writing, Story, and Lore

The story of Marathon runs deep, but you would not notice a lot of it without paying attention. Some quests give dialogue and faction lore, but the brunt of the story content is found in the Codex.

The misplay is that most players want to get back into the action, so they are likely skipping all of it. Marathon shows a number on your screen for unread Codex entries, and most players would rather just spam through the entries to make the number go down.

Some cosmetics are also unlocked through reading Codex entries, which makes this problem worse. If you have a bunch of unlockables waiting for you, you are more likely to spam through just to get them, and end up forgetting what you even unlocked in the first place.

Art Direction

I understand Marathon has a polarizing style. For some it is too bold, and for others it feels bland. Most of the issue comes down to character skins, since many of them are mostly recolors.

For a live service game this matters, because without enticing options they will have trouble supporting the game long term. On the other hand, I am glad they kept it simple early on, with a few truly exceptional skins instead of instantly turning it into a clown show. Please, for the love of God, I cannot have Beavis and Butt-Head skins happening again.

However, I love the art in this game. Not just the characters, but the world and the inhabitants all look very unique and interesting. I can understand it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s mine.

Audio Design

Where the game truly shines is the audio design. Everything — and I mean everything — has juicy, crunchy, or grandiose sound design. Guns, explosions, plant life, buildings shifting, all of it.

The sound design also does something brilliant. A lot of the ambient sounds can be slightly mistaken for hostile player movement. You end up unsure if it was a creak of metal, or the arrival of another team. That rewards players who stay focused and actually pay attention to their surroundings.

User Interface, Player Experience, and Social Systems

The tutorial is simple but not really a good introduction to the vibe of the game in my opinion. While I don’t want the tutorial longer, it would help to make it cooler. Maybe have it take place in Cryo Archive for a sense of grand mystery.

After the mid tutorial, you crash right into the thick of it: the menu.

The menu is the biggest gripe I have with the game. The user interface is for sure scaring players off. It is just far too many clicks to get around. This becomes a minor problem after playing for a while, because you do get used to it, but it is still likely pushing new players away.

You want players to be hooked early, and while the tutorial is necessary for player comprehension, the user interface hits them like a truck right after completing it. It can easily overwhelm someone who only got to scratch the surface of the game. A few solutions would be better traversal of menus, and better ways to clear notifications, while also making the first menu a better access point to the features a player needs to reach quickly. While this becomes less of an issue over time, it still would help a lot.

I also think a shooting range with free armory access would improve the new and veteran player experience drastically. Letting people try out builds instead of going in raw to every encounter, just hoping the new setup actually feels good.

The proxy chat is awesome in the game, when people use it. People are reluctant to reveal their position by responding back sometimes. The handful of times I have spoken to other teams, it has been truly hilarious — even when a player who was very upset with me called me a rat for cleaning up after he was the last person standing in a team fight.

A true improvement the game could have for proxy chat is having some missions or loot rooms require communication between rival teams. A momentary truce that could end in peaceful withdrawal from the area, or tyrannous bloodshed when someone gets greedy for the other team’s loot.

Performance

The game’s performance is not for the faint of hardware at times. While the game has been out, a few changes have improved performance for me, but from time to time I will still drop frames.

Restarting my PC fixes this issue, so my old computer might just be developing dementia. Other players have said CPU bottlenecking is an issue. Bungie has been working hard on performance though, and I have felt the improvements over time.

I checked with a few other friends to see their input on this, and for a modern game it actually runs surprisingly well for the amount that’s crammed into it. I get consistent frames for the most part, even in hectic battles. It is hard to attribute the frame drops directly to the game or my own hardware kicking the bucket.

(PC specs listed on my about page.)

Price and Value

The game’s price tag in my opinion is more than fair for what is being delivered. I feel like free-to-play has truly brainwashed most gamers into thinking every game should be free, and then just stuffed with predatory business practices immediately.

I would frame it like this: I am at around 150 hours of playtime and I do not see myself stopping anytime soon. I spent 40 dollars on this game. That means I am paying pennies per hour of game time. Were these hours well spent? I would say so.

Improvements

• User interface simplification and flow
• Mission quality-of-life improvements
• Tutorial improvements
• Shooting / build testing range
• Communication-based loot rooms
• Remove the Sekgen free kit from the game. (Just kidding… mostly.)

Final Thoughts

I have played similar games before, such as Hunt: Showdown and Dark and Darker. Hunt was my number one spot for a long time, with Dark and Darker being second. Despite its flaws, Dark and Darker is one of a kind.

At this point I would confidently have Marathon as my number one extraction shooter I have ever played. While yes, there is a dash of hope for the future in that statement, I truly believe Bungie has something amazing here, and I am excited for what they have in store.