Review: Marathon - Learning Curve, Crooked Learning

After a few weeks with Marathon, the new Extraction Shooter from Bungie, I'm coming away with very mixed feelings. On one hand, Bungie has once again proven itself the king of shooters, with addictive gunplay that scratches all the right itches from the very first second. On the other hand, Marathon is a game that demands so much patience and forgiveness from the player that I can understand why many people won't bother pushing forward with it. I was on the verge several times of saying I'd had enough and wanted to move on to another game, but the gameplay kept pulling me back time and time again, and I'm really glad I stuck with it.

Loop After Loop After Loop

If you have even minimal experience with Extraction Shooters, you already know the basics of Marathon - you drop into one of several available maps, loot from a wide variety of different areas, engage in firefights with both AI-controlled enemies and real players, and try to make it out alive with your haul. With that loot you go into another run, rinse and repeat. When this loop works, and it usually does, it delivers incredible action and tension that made my heart pound. The tension at extraction points is undeniably palpable, when you know at any given moment a player could jump you from the shadows and end your entire run, or an AI enemy from among the many types roaming the map that I have to say - are excellently crafted. For some reason my initial expectation for the PvE was that enemies would be pushovers, wouldn't provide too tough a challenge and would just be "padding," whose entire purpose was to die in two shots and bring me basic loot to carry me to battles against real opponents. I'm happy to say I was wrong, and the AI-controlled enemies are far from simple, and they even killed me several times in my first runs (yes, skill issue, what can you do).

How long will this loop hold up? Hard to say, especially when the game has some pretty significant competitors in the market like Arc Raiders and Escape From Tarkov that hold a "captive audience" who've invested enough hours in them to prevent them from switching to another game with a new learning curve, but in my opinion as long as Bungie manages to preserve the sense of tension and pressure that exists in every match, while continuing to support it with frequent updates, it will keep the existing audience interested and coming back for more.

In terms of gunplay, I mentioned this at the start and I'll repeat it here - unlike what we got in Arc Raiders for example, the weapons here feel simply phenomenal, with tons of power behind every shot and very fun variety with a very high quantity of guns of all types and different rarities. Obviously the more unique weapons will feel more, well, unique, but from the smallest pistol you'll find to the deadliest sniper rifle - everything feels simply excellent, as befits the genre champions who brought us Halo and Destiny.

A Lesson in Patience

Marathon is a game that gets better the more you play it, so you need to come with a lot of patience. I can understand those of you who say that if a game doesn't manage to grab you from the first hour, it's probably not a good game, but what can you do - there are games like that too. Extraction games are known for their massive learning curve, when around every corner there's loot, items and weapons that you simply don't know what to do with. In Arc Raiders this is done well, with characters who talk to you and give you missions that force you to go to new places in the different maps, find items and understand what they do, and generally be in interaction with the game world. In Marathon this exists too, but the learning curve is much steeper.

Let's start with the UI - what a mess for the eyes. There were complaints about the many menus and interface in general during the various beta phases the game had, but so far no changes have been made to it. You'll need to push forward and force yourself to understand what's going on until everything makes sense. At a glance it won't be clear to you which item is better than another, which weapon attachment is suitable for what you have, and what the upgrade you picked up actually does in practice. Usually I just went by color and prayed they weren't playing me. And all of this, by the way, you need to figure out while the world around you is still moving and you're exposed to attack. It's a very confusing and frustrating experience. Even the menus outside the game, like your skill tree that provides various upgrades such as the speed at which you loot, your storage size etc., don't provide a clear enough path and everything is very messy.

Added to all this are the Shells, which are basically the characters we take control of. Here the game starts to take on an appearance that also resembles the Hero Shooter genre, when each character has their own special abilities and upgrades you can find on the maps that relate directly to those abilities. This adds another layer to the learning curve I mentioned, because now you don't just need to learn what each item does, but what each different character does, how their abilities manifest on the battlefield, how to deal with it when it comes to real enemies, and which build suits each one. Again - lots of patience, come prepared. These are moments when the game starts to become frustrating and not fun, a feeling that can change very quickly once you jump into a new run, but to continue enjoying the game and progressing you'll be forced to engage with these menus, creating a very contradictory experience that will cause many players to drop out after a short time.

The Bottom Line

All the problems I mentioned can be fixed with enough updates and additional work. The skeleton of Marathon exists and it's very good, it just needs a bit more QoL improvements to turn it into the excellent experience hiding beneath the surface. If this is a game that intrigues you, I recommend giving it a try, just make sure you come prepared to go through a few hours of frustration and self-learning (or through YouTube guides, thank God).