Marathon

Marathon is an addictive extraction shooter featuring the same masterful gunplay that has made Bungie legendary, making it a must-play for fans of the genre and even those adverse to it.

Even within its own genre, Marathon is niche - bristling with outlandish color combinations and likely to reject those looking for something more relaxed. Stick with it, however, and the stellar gunplay, intriguing characters, fun mechanics, and tense scenarios will draw you in.

Marathon (2026) has me locked in, sitting in my brain until my next run. The barrier to entry is high, but it’s rewarding, with each death being a lesson learned.

Another big negative for Marathon is the stingy "reward pass," which is Bungie's version of a season pass. Seemingly taking no lessons from the last eight-ish years of battle/season pass development, it doesn't provide in-game currency or tantalizing rewards. It's just as dull as the Halo Infinite season pass was at its launch, if not more so. Those comparisons are even more warranted because Marathon's passes also don't expire, which is the one positive from the current iteration of the reward pass.

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Bungie’s big comeback attempts to refashion the extraction shooter formula by returning to its root.

If Arc Raiders was the extraction shooter genre’s Fortnite moment, then Marathon feels like it’s Apex Legends: a more hardcore take on the idea that focuses on pure skill rather than approachability. But based on the Server Slam trial, just like the Runner you control, it feels like it’s stuck in the wrong Shell.

There’s calm to be found among the tension of those metallic footsteps. The cold, hard sound of a UESC bot patrolling a hallway. It’s a threat, sure. A wrong move and you’ll be knocked before you know what’s happening. As long as they’re there though, as long as their thump-thump-thump moves along the corridor, you’ve got some semblance of protection. An early warning. And so you rifle through loot containers until the quiet sets in.

It’s been almost a decade since Bungie, the acclaimed studio behind Halo and Destiny, launched its last video game. To say that a lot has changed in that time is a severe understatement, whether we’re talking about the company disentangling itself from Activision and being acquired by Sony a few years later, or the rise and fall of myriad multiplayer trends.

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For the first time in nearly a decade, there's a new Bungie game to play. Technically, it's an old Bungie series rebooted, but for a lot of Bungie fans (myself included), Marathon was not the series that introduced me to the storied developer.

Three bags of loot, flanked by the bio-synthetic corpses of their previous owners and pools of blue blood. The scene of my murderous victory. Their weapons, implants, heals, and salvage are all mine. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was helping random solo players take out giant robots and diplomatically sharing the spoils in Arc Raiders. However, this is Marathon, and I've left goodwill and friendliness at the door. When the atmosphere is this intense, the gunplay feels this good, and the combat sandbox is this broad, I've found it almost impossible not to squeeze the trigger on every other Runn...