Marathon is a game I did not expect to get its hooks into me. On the surface, Bungie’s new PvPvE extraction shooter looked like the kind of game I had already drifted away from. I know Bungie’s work well. I put more than 1,500 hours into Destiny 2 and hundreds more into the first Destiny, enough to understand the studio’s strengths almost instinctively. Bungie knows how to make shooting feel good, how to build mystery into a world, and how to take a familiar idea and push it just far enough in a strange direction to make it feel fresh.
That pedigree is part of what made Marathon so intriguing, but it is also what made me cautious. The initial pitch of a PvP-focused extraction shooter did not immediately sound like my thing. I have enjoyed competitive multiplayer in the past, but more in the straightforward chaos of team deathmatch, Capture the Flag, or Halo-style arena design. Extraction shooters are built on a different kind of tension. They ask you to bring what you are willing to lose, step into a hostile environment, and hope you can leave with more than you came in with. If you fail to extract, everything is gone.
Give me a Marathon Art Book, please.
That risk is the genre’s central thrill, but it can also be its biggest wall. When I first started Marathon, that wall felt very real. The game is striking right away, full of bold art direction, sharp audio design, and a distinct sci-fi identity that practically demands your attention. But it also feels abrasive in its opening hours. It throws a lot at you at once, from contracts and factions to shells, currencies, equipment, and lore, and not all of it is communicated with the clarity it needs. There is a fine line between mystery and overload, and Marathon does not always stay on the right side of it.
What changed everything for me was reframing what kind of game I thought I was playing. I approached the game again from another angle. I stop treating Marathon as a competitive extraction shooter first and instead approach it as a story-driven one. Bungie did so many vignettes that drew me into the game, why not explore what those vignettes mean and peel the curtain back. Once I did that, the game opened up in a way I had not expected. The pressure to “win” every match started to fall away, and I became more interested in what each run was actually asking me to do, who was sending me out into these dangerous spaces, and what kind of world Bungie was constructing beneath the surface.
That is where Marathon becomes fascinating. You play as an expendable shell, a body that can be used, discarded, and replaced, taking on dangerous jobs for different factions with their own motives and ideologies. These groups are not just mission vendors in the usual live service sense. They feel like extensions of the world’s politics, ethics, and survival strategies. Some encourage aggressive player hunting, while others push exploration, scavenging, or more specialized objectives. The more I paid attention to who was giving me work and why, the more the game’s world started to take shape.
Bungie knows how to build impressive worlds.
It helps that Bungie still knows how to build lore that pulls you forward through curiosity. The story is not delivered cleanly or generously, and that’s part of the problem. Much of what makes Marathon interesting is buried under its systems, hidden in faction design, world-building details, and the logic of how its contracts function. If you are willing to slow down and meet it where it is, there is real substance here. If you are not, it is easy to come away thinking the game is all style and stress.
Mechanically, Bungie still delivers where it counts. The gunplay is excellent, with the responsiveness and feel you would expect from a studio with this much shooter DNA in its history. The shells offer distinct playstyles that give matches a nice layer of flexibility, whether you want to be aggressive, stealthy, supportive, or opportunistic. Even a class like Rook, which only appears in solo modes and drops into ongoing matches with preset gear, shows that Bungie is experimenting with role design in ways that feel tailored to the extraction format rather than copied from more traditional shooters.
What I appreciate most about Marathon, though, is that its tension comes from more than just loot loss. Other players are a threat, but they are also part of the broader instability that gives the game its texture. Unlike ARC Raiders, which turns player interaction into a social experiment about trust, cooperation, and betrayal, Marathon feels much more committed to confrontation. It is not asking whether players can coexist. It is building a world where pressure, conflict, and interference are part of the point. That sharper edge makes it less welcoming, but it also gives the game a clearer identity.
The Cryo Archive, Marathon’s endgame activity, is the clearest example of that identity in action. It feels almost raid-like in structure, blending difficult enemy encounters, progression mechanics, and the constant possibility of player interference into one giant pressure cooker. It is one of the most interesting things in the game because it shows how Bungie is trying to merge the mechanical complexity of its raid design with the volatility of extraction shooters. It is also where one of the game’s biggest concerns becomes impossible to ignore. A live multiplayer game this intricate needs enough players to sustain its systems, and Marathon asks a lot before it reveals what makes it special.
Cryo Archive is no joke, come prepared.
That makes it difficult to recommend without hesitation. The onboarding is rough, the friction is real, and the game’s best qualities are not always the ones it puts forward first. At the same time, I cannot deny how hard it has landed for me once I pushed through that barrier. I want to listen to the music, dig through the lore, watch the behind-the-scenes material, and keep inhabiting this world. I have not felt that kind of pull from Bungie since the early days of Destiny, and that alone says a lot.
Marathon is not an easy sell, but it is a bold one. It is stylish, mechanically sharp, and much more interesting than its surface-level pitch suggests. If Bungie can do a better job of helping players see the world, the story, and the reasons to care before the friction pushes them away, it may have something special on its hands. For now, it feels like a strong, ambitious swing that does not always make the cleanest first impression, but rewards the players willing to stay with it.
Marathon is a game I did not expect to get its hooks into me. On the surface, Bungie’s new PvPvE extraction shooter looked like the kind of game I had already drifted away from. I know Bungie’s work well. I put more than 1,500 hours into Destiny 2 and hundreds more into the first Destiny, enough to understand the studio’s strengths almost instinctively. Bungie knows how to make shooting feel good, how to build mystery into a world, and how to take a familiar idea and push it just far enough in a strange direction to make it feel fresh.
Marathon is a game I did not expect to get its hooks into me. On the surface, Bungie’s new PvPvE extraction shooter looked like the kind of game I had already drifted away from. I know Bungie’s work well. I put more than 1,500 hours into Destiny 2 and hundreds more into the first Destiny, enough to understand the studio’s strengths almost instinctively. Bungie knows how to make shooting feel good, how to build mystery into a world, and how to take a familiar idea and push it just far enough in a strange direction to make it feel fresh.
That pedigree is part of what made Marathon so intriguing, but it is also what made me cautious. The initial pitch of a PvP-focused extraction shooter did not immediately sound like my thing. I have enjoyed competitive multiplayer in the past, but more in the straightforward chaos of team deathmatch, Capture the Flag, or Halo-style arena design. Extraction shooters are built on a different kind of tension. They ask you to bring what you are willing to lose, step into a hostile environment, and hope you can leave with more than you came in with. If you fail to extract, everything is gone.
Give me a Marathon Art Book, please.
That risk is the genre’s central thrill, but it can also be its biggest wall. When I first started Marathon, that wall felt very real. The game is striking right away, full of bold art direction, sharp audio design, and a distinct sci-fi identity that practically demands your attention. But it also feels abrasive in its opening hours. It throws a lot at you at once, from contracts and factions to shells, currencies, equipment, and lore, and not all of it is communicated with the clarity it needs. There is a fine line between mystery and overload, and Marathon does not always stay on the right side of it.
What changed everything for me was reframing what kind of game I thought I was playing. I approached the game again from another angle. I stop treating Marathon as a competitive extraction shooter first and instead approach it as a story-driven one. Bungie did so many vignettes that drew me into the game, why not explore what those vignettes mean and peel the curtain back. Once I did that, the game opened up in a way I had not expected. The pressure to “win” every match started to fall away, and I became more interested in what each run was actually asking me to do, who was sending me out into these dangerous spaces, and what kind of world Bungie was constructing beneath the surface.
That is where Marathon becomes fascinating. You play as an expendable shell, a body that can be used, discarded, and replaced, taking on dangerous jobs for different factions with their own motives and ideologies. These groups are not just mission vendors in the usual live service sense. They feel like extensions of the world’s politics, ethics, and survival strategies. Some encourage aggressive player hunting, while others push exploration, scavenging, or more specialized objectives. The more I paid attention to who was giving me work and why, the more the game’s world started to take shape.
Bungie knows how to build impressive worlds.
It helps that Bungie still knows how to build lore that pulls you forward through curiosity. The story is not delivered cleanly or generously, and that’s part of the problem. Much of what makes Marathon interesting is buried under its systems, hidden in faction design, world-building details, and the logic of how its contracts function. If you are willing to slow down and meet it where it is, there is real substance here. If you are not, it is easy to come away thinking the game is all style and stress.
Mechanically, Bungie still delivers where it counts. The gunplay is excellent, with the responsiveness and feel you would expect from a studio with this much shooter DNA in its history. The shells offer distinct playstyles that give matches a nice layer of flexibility, whether you want to be aggressive, stealthy, supportive, or opportunistic. Even a class like Rook, which only appears in solo modes and drops into ongoing matches with preset gear, shows that Bungie is experimenting with role design in ways that feel tailored to the extraction format rather than copied from more traditional shooters.
What I appreciate most about Marathon, though, is that its tension comes from more than just loot loss. Other players are a threat, but they are also part of the broader instability that gives the game its texture. Unlike ARC Raiders, which turns player interaction into a social experiment about trust, cooperation, and betrayal, Marathon feels much more committed to confrontation. It is not asking whether players can coexist. It is building a world where pressure, conflict, and interference are part of the point. That sharper edge makes it less welcoming, but it also gives the game a clearer identity.
The Cryo Archive, Marathon’s endgame activity, is the clearest example of that identity in action. It feels almost raid-like in structure, blending difficult enemy encounters, progression mechanics, and the constant possibility of player interference into one giant pressure cooker. It is one of the most interesting things in the game because it shows how Bungie is trying to merge the mechanical complexity of its raid design with the volatility of extraction shooters. It is also where one of the game’s biggest concerns becomes impossible to ignore. A live multiplayer game this intricate needs enough players to sustain its systems, and Marathon asks a lot before it reveals what makes it special.
Cryo Archive is no joke, come prepared.
That makes it difficult to recommend without hesitation. The onboarding is rough, the friction is real, and the game’s best qualities are not always the ones it puts forward first. At the same time, I cannot deny how hard it has landed for me once I pushed through that barrier. I want to listen to the music, dig through the lore, watch the behind-the-scenes material, and keep inhabiting this world. I have not felt that kind of pull from Bungie since the early days of Destiny, and that alone says a lot.
Marathon is not an easy sell, but it is a bold one. It is stylish, mechanically sharp, and much more interesting than its surface-level pitch suggests. If Bungie can do a better job of helping players see the world, the story, and the reasons to care before the friction pushes them away, it may have something special on its hands. For now, it feels like a strong, ambitious swing that does not always make the cleanest first impression, but rewards the players willing to stay with it.
by Kurosh Jozavi
