Marathon Reviews

Marathon is a great-looking and extremely rewarding competitive extraction shooter let down by an inadequate prologue and poor monetization.

Marathon looks great and benefits from some excellent moment-to-moment action, especially if you’re playing with friends. Even so, the clear lack of content, terrible cosmetics, and abundance of repetitive fetch quests give you few compelling reasons to keep coming back for more once the initial burst of excitement wears off.

Marathon is further proof of Bungie's pedigree and ability to create enthralling, engaging, and addictive shooters. While Marathon is brutally challenging and unforgiving, especially for the solo or casual player, it begs to be experienced.

Marathon is hands down the best extraction shooter on the market. From the gunplay to the way the game handles the distribution of story, there's a lot to love in Marathon. While the quality of life could be improved in some respects and some of the UI elements could be adjusted, the overall game stands as a testament that Bungie knows how to make a good game. The biggest issue the game will face is appealing to the less hardcore players and getting them to stick around, but with Bungie continuing to iterate on the game, things will likely work out just fine for this unbelievably fun extraction shooter.

There’s been a lot of heat surrounding Marathon in the lead-up to its launch. Some say it’s not what they want from Bungie, others say it's a far cry from the glory days of Halo. But cutting through all of the noise, we think Marathon is actually a bold new adventure from Bungie.

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.

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 Runner I see.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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