Video game review
I imagine playing Marathon is a lot like running a marathon. At first glance and from a distance, it looks intimidating. Once you’re up close, you realize it looks that way for a reason: Because it is. But then you put in the work, and you realize something else: It was worth the effort, despite the self-inflicted agony you might suffer along the way.
Marathon, the latest game from Bellevue-based developer/publisher Bungie, is a bit of a homecoming for the studio best known for developing the Halo and Destiny franchises. Back in the mid-1990s, the company released the original Marathon and its two sequels for the Classic Mac OS. Set in the far future, this trilogy had players controlling a security officer aboard the colony ship UESC Marathon, dealing with the doldrums of spacefaring, like alien invasions and rogue artificial intelligence. Mechanically, it was your typical first-person shooter: Explore the ship, shoot anyone in your way, read some interesting lore stored on local terminals, rinse, repeat.
The 2026 version of Marathon — set in the same universe in the year 2893, 99 years after the events of the first game — shares some of that same DNA. But the Marathon of old this is not, because the newest entry in the decades-old franchise is a player-versus-player extraction shooter, one of the most punishing genres in gaming.
The gameplay loop is simple enough: You’re a Runner — a human who’s decided that having a living body isn’t nearly as cool as having a cybernetic one that you can implant your consciousness into — on the distant planet Tau Ceti IV. There’s a colony on the planet, and all sorts of goodies to be found. You pick your runner shell — Marathon’s version of the class system, which dictates which abilities your character has — and then gear up. You load into the map, you loot, you shoot (at other players and AI bots), you find the extraction point (which gets you out of the map) with said loot and then you do it all over again, hopefully with better gear.
But here’s the rub: If you’re the one who’s shot instead, you lose everything — including the gear you came in with. In effect, if you don’t extract, you get nothing; you’re just a loot piñata for other players. It’s brutal and demoralizing, and it makes you wonder why you even launched the game to begin with. But when you succeed? When you make it out after a nail-biting thriller of a firefight? When you find that high-level loot, or complete a difficult mission? It’s exhilarating in a way few games are, and it makes up for the frequent heartbreak of losing your gear.
And that’s only one reason you don’t want to get attached to your gear. Each season of Marathon lasts three months (there’s no real “end” to Marathon), and at the end of that time period, Marathon will reset all players’ gear and faction progression, plus their character levels, among other things. (You’ll keep cosmetics and achievements.) The goal is to keep players on a level playing field and to refresh the game, though the idea of losing everything I worked so hard to get does leave a bitter taste.
Being a Bungie game, I expected best-in-class gunplay like in Destiny — and Marathon delivers. Each weapon feels weighty and worthwhile, even if some are clearly better than others. (Looking at you, combat shotgun.) The weapons are so polished and effective that they actually create a bit of a problem: Firefights rarely last more than a few seconds. Whoever gets the drop first (or has the better shields) wins more often than not. So it behooves you to pay attention, to listen to your surroundings, to take your time. Running in guns a-blazin’ is rarely the right course of action, especially if you’re playing solo. (The game is built for three-player squads, and I highly recommend you team up with friends or let the game match you with other players; the game is far less punishing when it’s not you against the world.)
Narratively, Marathon is a bit of a surprise. Extraction shooters aren’t known for their stories, but this game is a rare exception. I was captivated by the plot-heavy cut scenes, and I lost hours diving into the deeply unsettling but utterly fascinating lore entries, hungry to learn everything I could about this universe and the people who inhabit it. I thoroughly enjoyed connecting how 2026 Marathon connected to 1994 Marathon, and what that might mean going forward.
Visually, Marathon might be one of the most stylistic games I’ve ever played. The use of vividly bright neon colors and deep shadows is intense. It’s an aesthetic that unnerves and mesmerizes in equal measure, like a box of crayons exploded over a horror movie. And it adds to the unease of Tau Ceti IV, a beautiful and horrifying setting that begs to be explored. (Related: Marathon launched with three playable maps, with a fourth one — the endgame zone known as Cryo Archive — released March 20.)
A few gripes: If you’re not familiar with extraction shooters (or FPS games in general), Marathon does a lousy job of introducing you to the mechanics. It just throws you into the deep end and says, “Good luck!” And the menus and user interface on consoles are simply abysmal, clunky and unintuitive to a surprisingly shocking degree.
In the end, Marathon is a fantastic game that will not be for everyone. It’s unforgiving by nature, quick to punish the smallest of mistakes. But success, as rare as it might feel sometimes, is euphoric. If you’re willing to put in the time — not unlike an actual marathon — it will reward you. Just don’t expect those rewards to come easy.
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