Marathon Review (Patreon)

When World of Warcraft was released to explosive acclaim in 2004, it wasn’t the first massively multiplayer online role-playing game on the market. For nearly a decade prior to that, the MMORPG trail was being blazed by games like Ultima Online, EverQuest, and Meridian 59. It’s not that those games were unpopular—heck, all three are still playable to this day—it’s more that World of Warcraft was the result of a popular developer coming in, looking at what the genre had done up to that point, and finding ways to sand down a few of the edges on the experience while still keeping the majority of things that made the genre unique. As a result, it attracted a whole new audience of people who had been curious about this style of game in the past, but perhaps found it too intimidating, too clunky, or too unforgiving. Blizzard’s decision to deploy the already-intensely-popular Warcraft universe here certainly helped.

Marathon is that, but for extraction shooters.

OK, let me backpedal a little bit on that. It isn’t quite the same situation. The industry is in a completely different place than it was 20 years ago. Player interests vary wildly, genres come and go in the blink of an eye, and getting a new thing to feel “established” seems harder than ever. So Marathon almost certainly won’t enjoy the level of mainstream success that World of Warcraft did. But Marathon is a game that takes an existing genre that many thought to be “too hardcore” for the masses and makes an awfully compelling case with a collection of guns that feel great to shoot, class abilities that lead to different playstyles, skill trees full of upgrades worth caring about, fun ways to collect more gear when your vault is running low, and a genuine sense of mystery mixed with the precise sort of “AI Constructs Gone Wild” premise that Bungie does best.

That premise comes from Marathon, the 1994 first-person shooter that only appeared on the Mac in its original form. As someone who mostly played games on a PC but had access to a Quadra at work, seeing the original Marathon back then was fascinating because it felt rare, if not completely forbidden, simply because it only appeared on a computer that wasn't considered to be much of a game machine. Marathon (1994) kinda falls into that post-Doom hole of shooters that doubled-down on things like story and dread over massive amounts of combat. I mostly remember that it felt awkward compared to most DOS shooters and the view bob was a touch gratuitous. But considering the only other game of note on the Mac at the time was probably Spectre VR, Mac owners had to take what they could get.

Ultimately, the parts of Marathon and its two sequels that are still worth talking about mostly deal with its mind-bending story, which was primarily told via text on in-world terminal screens. You don’t need to know that the new game is set nearly 100 years after the events of the old games… but it’s pretty neat that a multiplayer-focused shooter has any story at all, and this history helps ground the proceedings in something that makes sense for the universe while adding to the mystery of the entire world. Marathon (2026) is significantly richer as a result.

The short version of the story here is that you are one of many who are attempting to investigate what went wrong with the UESC Marathon, a colony ship full of humans that left Earth in search of a new home on Tau Ceti IV. The colony failed. Why? Where is everyone? Corporate interests back on Earth want to know what happened. You, then, are the sort of freelance boots on the ground for these efforts… though actually you are a consciousness, detached from physical form, who transfers into a temporary body on Tau Ceti IV, allowing you to live, run, die, live again, and so on. Got it?

The game is a first-person shooter about going into a series of areas to complete contracts and gather resources. You have limited time to get in, do your thing, and escape… escape is sort of the key part here. While many of the contracts you take on will not give a shit whether you live or die, if you fail to get the hell out safely at the end, you lose everything you were carrying, from the guns you brought with you to anything you found along the way. As such, getting out is key. The friction comes from both a faction of robot guards that patrol the various buildings and other players, hence the whole “PvPvE” thing. How much or how little you engage with these threats is often up to you, though plenty of contracts bring you into direct conflict by asking you to loot specific robots or, in the case of contracts for the Arachne faction, kill players. But this can also be a game about quick stealth as you attempt to just get your things and get the heck out without getting jumped.

Like a lot of other games of this type, the setup makes for a potentially interesting social experiment. Sometimes two players or teams will come into contact with each other and realize that fighting isn’t worth it, they’re better off just moving on and working on their given tasks. Proximity chat gives you a chance to state your case to other players, giving way to a certain type of player who runs into a room yelling “friendly friendly friendly.” Of course, this is part of the social game, because what could possibly be more exciting than yelling “friendly” at opposing players only to open fire during the confusion, right? Or maybe they really are friendly, right? Oh man, the best way to get good guns in Marathon is to steal them off of the corpses of other players, right? So you should probably just shoot that guy… right?

While Marathon allows for all of that, in my experience, the people playing it are largely opting out of those sorts of social hijinks in favor of immediate violence. They’ve skipped the conversation tree and are heading right to the end: taking your items off of you by force. In some ways, me coming to the conclusion that I need to stop giving strangers the benefit of the doubt is a significant part of why I’m enjoying Marathon. Gone is the will-they-or-won’t-they peeking and creeping that took place every time I saw someone in Arc Raiders. After a few days of players very much getting the jump on me by firing without hesitation, I simply became one of them. This morning a guy was running to an extraction point and when he heard me running up behind him he started tea-bagging the extraction point instead of shooting, like he was trying to say that we should extract together. Maybe if he had a mic I would have heard him out. Instead I stabbed him to death, took his stuff, and didn’t even extract afterwards because I had more looting to do. It felt good. It felt clean. Though that guy was probably kinda bummed.

Loss in Marathon can hold you back. Not only are you attempting to extract with better and better tools of the trade—guns, attachments, shields, and other various stat-boosting implants or cores—you’re also on the hunt for various upgrade materials. These are spent on the game’s six faction-specific skill trees. So a wipe can certainly be frustrating, but I’m finding that the game does a pretty good job of dusting you off and getting you ready to get back out there. For starters, the different classes have abilities, giving you something to work with no matter how empty your vault might be. The game will also give you what’s referred to as a “sponsored kit,” which is a gun, ammo, and a few healing items—just enough to let you get back out there and kill your way to something better. I’ve never felt like I was out of the game or hugely behind after a loss, which is a dramatically different feeling than I’ve had in other, similar shooters and a large part of why Marathon works for me.

Earning faction rep happens when you complete contracts or do something that one of the factions likes. Arachne likes it when you murder players. NuCaloric likes it when you pick up plants. A mix of rep, upgrade items, and credits goes into filling out each faction-specific skill tree. Some of these skills are more useful than others. Many of them unlock the ability to purchase specific types of upgraded items, which is useful for when you have a bunch of money and don’t feel like scavenging for guns. Some of them are just straight-up stat bonuses, like one that simply makes your knife more powerful. Melee is great here because it’s quiet and, once you’ve upgraded it, you can take out basic robots in one hit, conserving ammo and avoiding noise all at once. Some upgrades make your rook more powerful, and that’s… super interesting.

Marathon is a class-based shooter with some standard archetypes and active abilities that work off of a mix of cooldowns and a heat meter that acts as a sort of stamina gauge. The healer can resurrect players from a distance. There’s a stealth character that can activate stealth camo for 15 seconds. The destroyer comes with a big, glowing shield that can be used to draw attention and push forward against enemies. The thief has a grappling hook, the vandal has an arm cannon that knocks targets back, and so on. Then you’ve got the rook.

The rook is different from the other classes in that you can only play alone, you can’t team up. You also can’t take any of your gear in with you as a rook, so it defaults to a basic loadout. You can’t even make progress on your contracts as a rook. The rook is there for when you just need stuff. If you are in need of things, the rook might be the perfect way to get them.

When you launch into a match as a rook, you’re matched into team games, so you’re a solo player going into a match where teams of three are playing. The catch is that you jump into these matches after 10 or so minutes have already passed. So teams have taken on teams, dead bodies are everywhere, and that means… bags. If you skulk around as a rook you might just find high-end weapons just lying around. But as you upgrade your rook you’ll start with more things, like better healing items, a better starting weapon… heck, you can even spawn with a claymore mine in your inventory, once you buy the right upgrade. Claymores are extremely fun in Marathon because you can just sneak up behind someone and plop a claymore down, causing it to explode almost immediately. You may have seen clips of rooks taking out entire teams with these sorts of guerrilla tactics. It’s extremely good. Rooks can also temporarily disguise themselves in ways that get the robots to ignore them, which makes getting from place to place a bit easier. It’s a really fun and different way to play the game that can help break up the action as well as get you back on your feet after a stretch of bad runs.

Between playing as a rook, playing a normal shell as a solo player, and playing as a part of a team (three, by default, though the developer is currently testing a two-player team mode), the game always has something for you to do. You’re always working towards some kind of upgrade or contract or level goal. And the different options feel a lot different, too. Playing as a part of a team feels slightly more laid back, to me. You’re going from place to place, trying to complete everyone’s contracts, encountering team fights and other obstacles along the way. It’s a game about finding ways to resurrect your teammates midfight, finding time to back off and heal in the middle of an encounter, that sort of thing. Solo feels more like a horror movie. A single mistake can cost you the match and no one is there to pick you up if you fall. I think I prefer solo play, and have spent hours sitting still and listening to footsteps trying to figure out if a player is upstairs or right around the corner. It’s fun! Unfortunately for solo players, you’ll probably advance through the faction ranks a lot faster with a team, since you get credit for any teammates' completed contracts. Since you’ll need to be level 25 before you can actually travel to the UESC Marathon and search for even crazier loot and mysteries, you’re going to want those levels.

Visually, Marathon looks amazing. This is actually sort of a surprise since I didn’t really think the first betas looked all that great, and between then and now the studio had to deal with a plagarism problem around a lot of its specific art and design. Though the circumstances that led to someone else’s work ending up in the game as well as the talks that led to the artist saying she was satisfied with the resolution of that situation aren’t really known, the end result worked out. That artist, ANTIREAL, is now credited in the final game.

Sometimes I feel like modern big studio games don’t really have any serious style to them. Sure, the Persona games have cool menus, and even though games have grown out of the brown days of Xbox 360 military monotony, it’s rare that you see something that really stands out. Marathon stands out in a way that approaches some of the highs of Designers Republic-era Wipeout, but it pulls in a variety of influences and styles. ANTIREAL’s fantastic type of cyberpunk aesthetic is still present across a lot of the game, but you’ll also see that kind of super-clean, plain-worded consumer product design that Virgil Abloh’s Off-White did for Nike. Throw in some runner clothing that has a techwear vibe, a touch of health goth’s takes on athletic wear, a smidge of Evangelion typeface work, some post-ASCII terminal art, and you’ve got… well, you’ve got a lot. But it meshes together in a way that fully backs up the game’s take on corporations as culture. It’s a game where something as dumb as a “drinkable cheeseburger” can live alongside weird futuristic worms that weave your runner shells before each run. Some may find it busy, I’d say that the world is busy and only getting busier. It’s a jumbled mess that works perfectly together.

Ultimately, I think that’s the thing about Marathon. It all fits, creating a cycle where even failure can be more inspirational than discouraging. Considering most of my time with other extraction shooters ended after a way-too-discouraging defeat, I’d say that’s a huge part of what sets Marathon apart from the pack. They’ve created (well, iterated on) a story and universe where you want to know what’s next, you want to see the next part of this mystery unfold, whether that’s in-game or through some kind of ARG. Bungie’s set the stage for something truly special, and I hope they take this opportunity to really play around in this space and come up with a wide variety of weird activities to match the game’s vibe.

5/5