Marathon Is A Thrilling Shooter With A Big Onboarding Problem

Marathon is brutal. That’s kind of the point. You play a futuristic gig economy worker paid by cyberpunk corpos who’s repeatedly getting murdered as you scavenge a dangerous, abandoned space colony for valuable gear, tech, and data. In a single-player game these vibes could be hitched to a meticulously calibrated campaign where every moment is carefully designed, engineered, and tested to keep things ultra-tense without repeatedly kicking the player’s teeth in. That’s a lot harder in a multiplayer game where every level comes with up to 18 super-sized human variables.

This is the promise of Marathon and also its curse. Play a couple of rounds and you will not be shocked to see that the game’s free beta weekend has massive bounce rate on Steam as people try and it and seemingly don’t return. Bungie’s extractions shooter requires a lot of the player. They are at a severe disadvantage if they’re alone and not on the mic. Their characters start out weak and incredibly impaired. Sprinting quickly overheats your body. Even sliding at the wrong time can leave you hopelessly vulnerable.

There are nuances to Marathon that are hard to immediately pick-up on and the game routinely punishes you for being even a little dumb, impatient, or under-prepared. You might think the point of the game is to drop into a match, kill tons of stuff, complete an objective, and escape with great loot. That’s what most other shooters have taught players, including Bungie’s own Destiny 2. In actuality, Marathon is about dropping down to a planet’s surface, hoarding your bullets like gold, and trying to avoid fights when and wherever possible.

Doing so will help you slowly accrue all the gear and upgrades you need to start projecting yourself as a real bad-ass threat on Tau Ceti IV. Failing to do so will make you feel like you’re hitting your head against a wall and making no progress because you’re terrible at the game and playing it wrong. You might actually be terrible and you are definitely playing it wrong, but one of those things is fixable and can still lead to a lot of enjoyment with Marathon. But the game itself currently offers little in the way of guardrails to steer players into how to approach Marathon and have fun with it while they’re still figuring it out.

In some ways it’s like the opposite of Destiny 2. Bungie’s ongoing loot shooter, despite its notoriously convoluted and confusing early game, is overwhelmingly generous, showering players with rare gear and second chances at every turn. If I had one main criticism of the game in recent years it’s that it’s gotten too trivial at the bottom end of the grind. But Marathon is like if you introduced players to Destiny 2 by throwing them all into one of its end-game raids together. But also friendly fire was turned on, loot was scarce, and you only got to keep what you survived with.

That’s an incredibly bold and exciting way to shake things up and also an experience designed to chew most people up and spit them out before they ever catch a whiff of what makes Marathon so special they might want to spend $40 on it. We’re in day four of the game’s free server slam and Bungie has kept reassuring players that it’s listening to feedback about how to re-tune everything from med pack and ammo economies to the gorgeous but overbearing UI and lack of PVP and heat generation during movement.

I think it’s easy to look at any of those and understand why they might make Marathon less fun for people. They certainly don’t make it easier to play. But they’re also all things you can start to rationalize and come around on the more you play, especially once you start trying to adapt to the game that’s actually in front of you rather than the one you’re expecting. Unfortunately, I Marathon‘s initial hostility will stop most people from ever getting to a place like that.