For the last few weeks, most of my nights have ended with a few hours of Marathon. Some nights, I walk away from Bungie’s new extraction shooter feeling amazing. Other nights, I hang my head in shame and quietly make my way upstairs. And then there are the evenings when I contemplate uninstalling the damn game. But I return, pop some sucker with a rifle and take all his goodies. I fall back in love with Marathon as I drive my knife into the other player, scrambling away on the ground and leaving behind a neon trail of cyborg blood. “This game fucking rules!” I think, forgetting all the pain. Forgetting all the disasters.
That’s Marathon, a game with a narrative built around dying over and over again and hoping for something better, yet killing anyone who crosses you, inevitably continuing the cycle of ruthless violence that has doomed all those who scour the planet of Tau Ceti IV to endless, wonderful suffering.
Marathon is back
Out now on PS5, Xbox, and PC, Marathon is the latest online shooter from Destiny and Halo maker Bungie. It’s a new game, but a direct follow-up to Bungie’s classic Doom-like Marathon trilogy from the 1990s. But where those games were single-player level-based shooters, the new Marathon is a PvPvE extraction shooter built around survival, loot, and social interactions.
It’s an odd direction in which to take the Marathon franchise, but the series’ setting and lore prove to be a wonderful foundation for a first-person extraction shooter set in a striking, colorful sci-fi universe that feels 3D printed and sharply inorganic. Guns and buildings are covered in barcodes and contrasting colors. Menus are filled with different fonts and neon highlights. It might not be a style that appeals to everyone, but I sure dig it.
The Marathon universe also provides plenty of shady sci-fi corporations willing to pay you credits to kill runners, destroy robotic guards, and steal valuable items from a once-thriving-but-now-empty colony that went radio-silent a long time ago. The companies that invested in its creation are back now to extract (*wink wink*) what they can from the failed settlement, and you, yes you, are their tool for recouping their losses.
Players take control of a few different playable “shells,” which are essentially characters with their own powers, skills, and abilities. Some can turn invisible. Some can create an energy shield. Some, like my personal favorite Recon, can track targets through walls and toss out a cool spider-bot to blow them up.
Once you pick a shell, you and other “Runners” teleport onto one of the different maps set on Tau Ceti IV and start exploring, looting, killing, and when you’re ready, hopefully extracting with good stuff and a hell of a story or two.
Death and contracts
But before hopping down to the planet’s surface, you and your squad of two other players can pick a contract to try to complete for the corporations. And let’s be clear: These contracts are mostly bad.
Many of them feel barely connected to the corporations they represent. The bulk of them ask players to do such exciting activities as “Loot some gels,” or “Go to X location and hit a button,” or maybe “Kill some stuff.” Riveting! These quests are not memorable (though you may remember a particularly annoying one if you get stuck on it for a while), and can often feel like busy work. Yet the contracts are also very important as they give players a goal during each run. Something to work towards, either individually or collectively. And many of them can be completed even if you die and fail to extract, making a bad run still feel worth it.
And you will die. You will die a lot.
©BungieMarathon is a game where you can spend 15 minutes carefully looting and sneaking around the map, collecting a haul of useful resources that can be used to upgrade your inventory space and more. But just as you try to leave, a random Runner with a sniper blows your cyborg brains out the back of your head, and if you’re playing solo and don’t have a self-revive, that’s it. That’s the ballgame. You lost all of that gear and any gear you brought in with you, even that awesome, super-rare rifle that you’ve used in a few runs and loved. It’s gone. All of it is gone, and likely now in the backpack of the asshole who killed you. A few seconds later, you’re back in the main menu of Marathon, poorer and likely a little angry. Time to go again.
If that paragraph sounds like a horrible, miserable experience…well, you are correct. Dying and losing everything sucks shit in Marathon. Anybody who says otherwise is lying. And I suspect for many, this loop of dying frequently and losing all your cool gear in the process makes Marathon a game they have no interest in playing.
But think about this: What if you were the asshole sniper watching that extraction point, with little but a rifle and some bullets in your backpack? And what if you were the one to drop that player loaded up with all those goodies? What if you got to run over to them, finish them off, and take everything they had as your own and leave? Doesn’t that sound awesome? That’s the allure of Marathon.
Welcome to the casino
Marathon is a game in which you’re constantly wanting to be on the other end of the losing fight. It’s a slot machine of death and loot. Each time you spin, dropping onto the planet, you hope to land on a jackpot. That one kill or team wipe that rewards you with all the best gear. And chasing that high, that feeling of not just winning but taking all the spoils, is why I keep coming back to Marathon each night, even after I get my teeth kicked in.
There are ways to mitigate risk. Ways to rein in Marathon’s tendency to grind people up and spit them out.
You can play as Rook, a fully robotic shell that drops into matches mid-game to loot what you find and then escape with it. He can’t complete contracts or play with others, but he provides players with an option between tense runs to take a breather, risk nothing, and maybe win big. Likewise, players always have the option to take a “sponsored kit” into a run. These come with a few bullets, a gun, and some basic healing items. They ain’t great, but they are free and let you play without risking your own hard-earned loot. It almost feels like stealing whenever I return with a backpack of powerful guns and healing items after running a sponsored kit.
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Back-of-the-box quote:
“One more run. That’s all I need to get back on top.”
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Developer
Bungie
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Type of game:
Online-only PvPvE sci-fi extraction shooter
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Liked:
Guns feel good, Cryo Archive is rad, striking style, great music
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Disliked:
Challenges aren’t much fun, cluttered menus
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Platforms:
PC, Xbox Series X/S, PS5 (Played on PS5 Pro)
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Played:
Played around 25 hours in co-op runs and another 35 or so solo
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Release Date:
March 5, 2026
But those options go out the window if you want to experience Marathon’s endgame: Cryo Archive.
Only available to play on the weekends, in Cyro Archive players are forced to bring some of their best gear, no Rooks are allowed, and sponsored kits are banned. If Marathon is a casino, Cryo Archive is the high rollers’ table. It’s a massive, complicated, and hard-to-learn map where death is around every corner, and each player you meet is surely loaded up with great gear. Cyro Archive is so intense to play that my friends and I can only do a few runs before we need to take a break and go die somewhere else for a bit.
I need a weapon
It would be wrong for me not to mention another reason I keep coming back to Marathon. Once again, Bungie has made a shooter that is filled with guns that feel incredible to use. Like with Destiny and Halo before, Marathon’s first-person shooting is sublime. Rifles feel punchy and mean. Pistols are sleek and snappy. And explosives rattle your head and let everyone around, even the enemies, know where you are.
Maps in Marathon aren’t just filled with other human players, but robotic guards that come in various flavors. Some are pushovers that will die with a few knife hits or bullets. Others take more damage. Then you have the elite robots who can wipe careless teams from the map with their big guns, shields, and massive life bars. Fighting bots is fun. Fighting players is exhilarating.
Bungie’s gunplay is as good as always, with bullet hits against players feeling satisfying and shots on you feeling incredibly painful and scary. A firefight in Marathon might last just a few seconds, or it could stretch on for minutes, as two squads poke at each other using rifles or try to rush in using their powers and a nasty shotgun. All of it is amazing.
Regardless of anything else, Bungie has once again made a first-person shooter that feels and plays better than nearly anything else out there right now.
©BungieI’ll always have the memories
I can’t tell you what the future holds for Marathon. Like the rest of the internet, I, too, can study SteamDB charts and try to pull insight from them. But none of that really matters when you’re 20 minutes into a great run and trying to exfil with all your rare loot as players hunt you down. Sales charts mean nothing to me when I get out alive and pump my fist and congratulate my squadmates on a job well done.
Marathon is a good game. It is a great game. It’s a special game. This is something that I’ll remember for a long time, even if it dies like so many other live-service games.
In Marathon, every season will end with all of your gear being wiped from your vault. One more example of Marathon being ruthless to its players. And that’s something that lingers in the back of my mind as I fumble through my gear to build a new loadout for one last run on Tau Ceti IV. All of this stuff will be gone in a few months when the season ends. There’s no getting around it, yet that doesn’t change the amazing moments I’ve experienced. It doesn’t make Marathon, in the moment, worse or lesser. Because while live-service economics and seasonal shifts can take all my guns and maybe even take away the game itself, nobody can take away the time I spent with Marathon and all the triumph and suffering I endured.
The future might be bleak, but Marathon fucking rules.
English (US) ·