The moment you load up Marathon, you’re immersed into a soundbath of colour, distorted audio and technological lexicon that’s zany enough to give Cyberpunk a run for its money. Bungie wants you to know that this game is miles away from anything it’s done in the past – for both better and worse.

I won’t mince words, launching a new extraction shooter in 2026 is a bold feat. With a pressure to pull in as many players as possible and get them locked in for a long tail of monetisable post-launch content, there’s always a worry about whether this sort of game is still going to be here a year down the road. Many have already fallen foul of their corporate overlord’s ambitions.

While I’m not a fortune teller, I can say that from what I’ve played in its first week online, Marathon has strong foundations. Bungie’s long legacy of creating tactile sci-fi shooters shines through with an art style that I am desperate to admire in the form of a hardback coffee table book one day. But that quality equally highlights just how much of this game appeals to a niche audience, and it’s a bucket I sadly don’t think many will fall into.

The concept of Marathon is immediately enticing. You play as one of several ‘Shells’ with your consciousness uploaded into them. Each run, you drop into one of four maps at launch, each laden with loot to discover, enemy mobs to kill, and other players competing for the same thing.

There’s a huge element of risk involved with each run as any loot you take into these arenas only comes back out of them if you do. And unlike rival extraction shooters like ARC Raiders, Marathon is far more oppressive in its design.

This is made clearly early on as the tutorial warns the player to be cautious of enemy players they encounter. Combine that with environments that feel overly out to get you with bugs crawling down the walls and adverse weather pounding on your visor, the planet of Tau Ceti IV is a place that always has you looking over your shoulder.

Marathon gives you a few bits of basic kit to start with, but before long you’re picking up new weapons that really speak to Bungie’s history. Most of them feel like love letters to the arsenal of Halo, with almost like-for-like replicas of the Battle Rifle, Magnum and Sniper Rifle.

Landing shots on enemies and breaking shields feels crunchy and tactile, making gunfights something you’re eager to get into rather than shy away from. Combat is the meat and potatoes of Marathon, which makes it all the more painful when entering those risky encounters results in losing all your progress of the last twenty minutes – especially given the time to kill is pretty low in its current state.

Marathon does alleviate some of the pain of losing all your gear by providing a ‘Rook’ Shell. This is a more basic character kit that’s intended purely for scavenging, but a great way to drop back into the action without slipping further into a loot hole.

There are also Sponsored Kits provided by the game’s several factions, which are handed out frequently during the early hours of the game. This is another quality of life feature I came to appreciate in Marathon, along with things like loot auto sorting and selling itself after each run.

Bungie appears to be making the extraction genre as accessible as possible, even if its combat is slightly on the tricky end of the difficulty scale.

However, while Marathon is absolutely dripping in style, that can sometimes come at the expense of functionality. As gorgeous as its design is to flick through in its menus, they can be pretty endless. When you’re not skulking around the surface of Tau Ceti IV, you’re sorting loot, speaking to factions and taking on new contracts from a menu rather.

Personally, I feel Bungie really missed a trick here. The Tower in Destiny serves as a place for players to have downtime in between the more intense gameplay, and interacting with vendors and other NPCs really helps to contextualize what you’re doing and the story behind it.

I am enthralled by Marathon’s setting, its design, and its identity – but much of that takes a back seat when I have to interact with it through a 2D menu. When lore is hidden away in codex entries and NPCs are only spoken to like they’re on FaceTime, it’s much harder to feel properly invested in the world Bungie is presenting.

Some of that form over function design translates to the 3D environments, too. I’ve lost count of the amount of times that I’ve walked up to something in the world thinking it’s an interesting piece of loot, only for it to be random clutter I can’t interact with.

Uninteresting is the word I’d use to describe a few other aspects of Marathon, too. Most of the quests given by factions revolve around either collecting or destroying items in the world with them feeling very low stakes in the moment-to-moment gameplay.

Arguably the most important aspect of an extraction shooter – the loot – is also pretty lacklustre. I’d often only keep the highest rarity items on me at any one time, letting the auto-loot sorter do the work for me when returning back to base.

This might be the nihilistic side of me speaking here, but Marathon ultimately boils down to being a game about making numbers go up. Your overall goal is to end up with better loot than you started with, and I’m not overly clear on what the end result of that gameplay loop is.

Bungie is hinting at raid-like events coming later in the season, which will no doubt be a great spectacle – especially with the fantastic gunplay foundations it’s already laid. But at the end of Season 1, all of that progress is wiped and we’re back to square one.

As a result, Marathon feels like it has the most potential at its end destination rather than the journey you take to get there, which is the total opposite of how rival ARC Raiders approaches things. Because of the camaraderie nature of that game’s setting, you feel inspired to work alongside other players towards a common goal, and it does a great job of cultivating those community moments that feel earned rather than orchestrated.

From what I’ve played so far, Marathon doesn’t have any of that. It’s a game that caters very much to the PvP crowd in a format that I strongly feel needs a healthy community approach for it to succeed – at least to the masses.

There’s so much of Marathon that I love. Its art direction is the most interesting I’ve seen in a game for years, and its shooting mechanics are second to none. But I can’t help but feel Bungie has chosen the completely wrong genre to make this game succeed, and it has me seriously doubting whether the decision to go live service has cut the legs out from under it before it’s even hit the ground.

3/5

Reviewed on PC. Review code provided by the publisher.