Marathon (2026) Review

Marathon Might Have That Bungie Polish, But It Completely Misses the Point of Extraction Shooters: A Dynamic and Enjoyable Experience

Before we talk about Marathon, I want to first tell you a story of mine from its main competitor, Arc Raiders. During one of my excursions, I ran into a hostile player who tagged me with a rifle shot right before I entered a building. I tried to communicate that I was friendly, but they were having none of it. As I sprinted into a nearby building, I knew I was playing at a disadvantage, as I only had a silenced pistol and little ammo. However, I did have a trick up my sleeve. I knew that he thought I was on the ropes and was going to run in after to finish me off, but in my prior scavenging, I had managed to find a grenade. So right as I entered the building and rounded the corner, I threw the grenade right at the frame of the door—and what do you know: the instigator came running right on top of it as it exploded, knocking him down and getting me the kill. Using proximity chat, he cursed me out quite a bit, but just before I put him in the dirt, I told him he shouldn’t start shit he can’t finish. This was early in my playtime with Arc Raiders, and this story, plus many more like it, is the reason I sunk so many hours into that game. If that exact scenario happened in Marathon, he would have killed me with that first shot, and that would have been that.

If you manage to survive long enough, Marathon has some cool enviroments to explore

That is the core problem with Marathon: it has created an environment that doesn’t allow natural stories like that to happen. Because the time-to-kill is so fast and the movement so slow, any sort of encounter you have with another player is immediately hostile and ends incredibly quickly. That doesn’t allow situations where you try to convince the other player to stand down, extended firefights, or situations involving the NPC enemies. It always ends in violence, it always ends quickly, and for at least one person, it ends in a frustrating experience. In my 50+ runs with Marathon, I did not once encounter a single friendly player—or even a player who used the proximity voice chat. This harsh, hyper-competitive PvP is by design. This isn’t just a bad bunch of super-hostile players that I happen to be matched with every single time. The game encourages this by having specific quests and characters that are entirely PvP-focused—something Arc Raiders completely lacks. So with a player base trained on immediate hostility and a game designed with high penalties for even the smallest mistakes, it has created one of the most frustrating experiences I have played in a very long time.

 

This ain't your father's Marathon!

Time and time again, I would enter a match with my limited equipment and be killed quickly, usually with no chance of defending myself or fighting back. If a player spots you first and shoots you, you are dead. It takes the worst practices of competitive shooters and not only makes them viable options, but in most cases, the only option to survive. The few times I extracted successfully were not because I was skillful in my shooting or had better gear; it was because I spent 20 minutes hiding in a corner and killing players until I got what I needed. I wasn’t scavenging around interesting environments or getting into extended firefights with other players. I was playing like an asshole because, sooner or later, I would be killed by someone else playing like an asshole.

29 seconds. I was killed by a player in 29 seconds.

 

Being on a losing streak in Marathon is the worst thing in the world because the more you die, the more equipment you lose, and the harder the game gets—which leads to you dying more. The game, as far as I can tell, has no matchmaking with players of similar gear and skill levels. You could spawn with a donated kit or one gun, no shields, and little ammo, next to a person who is completely kitted out. I had one game where I spawned literally next to someone and died in less than 30 seconds.  The funny thing is, the game quantifies the gear you bring in with a loadout value, so Bungie knows exactly how equipped you are, but still refuses to match you with similarly geared players. But I guess that would be expecting too much when they can’t even spawn players far enough apart that they don’t immediately run into each other. In fact, I would say the time it took to get into a game was often longer than the time it took for someone to kill me. That is a massive failure on a technical and design level.

Can you tell what any of these are because I certainly can't.

The absolute worst part of Marathon, however, is that for all the issues I have with the core fundamentals of the game and how much it frustrates me, it is extremely well made and polished. Bungie is up there with id Software in making games that just feel good to play. It is responsive and weighty, but also smooth and precise. It comes as no surprise that the studio behind Halo and Destiny knows how to make a shooter feel excellent.

The story is entirely told by migraine inducing static screens like this.

The aesthetics of the game, while not my cup of tea personally, look like nothing else on the market. The combination of neon colours and retro tech makes Marathon look like nothing that came before it. Unfortunately, it is mostly style with little functionality. The UI, while incredible to look at, is not nearly as enjoyable to navigate. Most items are simple symbols that are hard to discern without mousing over them to see what they are. When your game has a large portion dedicated to inventory management, it needs to function smoothly—but in that regard, Bungie failed. I don’t know how many times I tried to simply drop an item out of my inventory, only for it to refuse. Marathon has a lot of little annoyances like that. For example, the game doesn’t save your latest matchmaking settings. Several times, I found myself in randomly matchmade teams because the game forgot that I had a solo option enabled. 

Something this cool looking shouldn't be this frustrating.

At the end of the day, I don’t like Marathon. It is a frustrating, annoying experience that caters only to the most sweaty hardcore players. It doesn’t have any of the dynamic stories that games like Arc Raiders and Escape from Tarkov have that make people keep playing. It doesn’t have matchmaking that puts similarly skilled and equipped players together. It doesn’t have anything I want out of a competitive shooter. Bungie has essentially made the most polished bad game in history. I tried so hard to like Marathon, but after every single round where I get shot out of nowhere and killed instantly, I just wish I were playing something else.