One of Marathon's more controversial mechanics brings back a neat idea from Anthem

Bungie's Marathon reboot is out on PC today. Based on last weekend's playtest, it has already been deemed the most difficult, aka "sweatiest" extraction shooter in a while. For as the old Victorian saying goes, women glow, men perspire, and gamers sweat.

The game's cyborg runner shells do not sweat. This is unfortunate, because one of nu-Marathon's core mechanics is heat. Similar to a stamina bar, your ability to sprint, slide and perform various other traversal abilities is limited by your body temperature. This has divided early players, in that it has gotten a lot of you straight-up murdered when you try to out-manoeuvre opponents, but you can mitigate the effects with upgrades. More immediately, you can take creative advantage of pools of water and the changing weather to keep your thermal signature in check. Those "dire" marshes? Actually kind of convenient.

I like this partly because it reminds me of Anthem, BioWare's aborted open world RPG shooter, in which you'd jet around in a Javelin suit, using waterfalls and rivers to cool off and so, extend your flight and operational capabilities. Anthem had a lot of nice ideas that it made sadly inadequate use of. Its temperature system encouraged you to feel your way through and respond to the terrain in a slightly more esoteric fashion than the usual somersaulting from cover to cover.

I've spent my little time in Marathon so far goggling at the landscape aesthetics, which I clunkily offered up as visual metaphors for apocalyptic Nvidia discourse. I'm intrigued to dive back in and see if the map's changeable temperature modifiers facilitate a similar kind of 'symbiotic' relationship with the terrain.

(Julian has just said on Slack that Marathon's heat mechanics reminds him of the more venerable and celebrated Mechwarrior series. Fine, I guess he wins this particular battle in our on-going Name Check Wars.)

If you're struggling to make headway in Marathon, for whatever reason, our guides team stand ready to fill your head with gunwisdom like Neo being pumped full of kung fu. If you mourn Anthem's loss, you might be interested in former BioWare fellah Mark Darrah's currently unfunded proposal to revive it as a singleplayer RPG.