Marathon review-in-progress: "A firecracker wrapped in silk, Bungie has created my favorite multiplayer shooter in years"

I watch moths crawl over synthetic skin and wonder if I'm about to kill or be killed. In Marathon's loading screen, these moths create artificial bodies for your mercenary protagonist's consciousness to control. But if moths represent life, their woven progeny – called Shells – mean certain death. Created to scavenge loot from a distant colony-turned-graveyard among the stars, Shells are fodder; existing only to facilitate dreams of violence and glory. This is, after all, an extraction shooter.

The fingerprints of fellow genre titans Escape from Tarkov and Arc Raiders – risking gear against players and AI-controlled enemies in a timed raid, hoping to extract with valuables – are unmistakable, but Marathon's high-stakes matches are a fragment of a far greater whole. Whether you're drawn to heart-in-mouth shootouts, existential cyberpunk style, or the mysteries of its sci-fi storytelling; there are endless tendrils to draw you beneath Marathon's sinew and cable – and after 60 hours, I've stopped coming up for air.

Matters of life and death

Despite being in conversation with other extraction shooters, Marathon's identity is so pure that you would be forgiven for thinking it was born immaculate. The game's raids take place on Tau Ceti IV, a distant planet once considered possible salvation for a resource-starved humanity. Now, its residents are nowhere to be found, and their colony – a frontier of glossy plastics in an alien wilderness – is guarded closely by the United Earth Space Council (UESC) and its robotic soldiers.

As a Runner, your job is to slip into a Shell on Tau Ceti IV and plunder it at the behest of corporations, revolutionaries, and religious bodies who offer you contracts. Each faction feels like a cyberpunk riff on Dune's Great Houses, with a splash of Neon Genesis Evengelion's maximalist digital chic. "Everything runs on CyberAcme. Or nothing runs at all," reads the slogan for CyAc, the corporation behind AI that runners use to interface with Shells. Religious death cult Arachne, represented by a tangle of arms and knives, seeks to accelerate Tau Ceti IV's violence, while the face of Shell-maker SekGen is a talking silk worm.

These stylish dystopian entities offer frighteningly believable glimpses of capitalism with its foot on the gas. Still, they're your only means of surviving on Tau Ceti IV. Raising your reputation with each vying power unlocks upgrades for your Runner, better gear from vendors, and story-driven contracts that let you dig into the fate of the colony and UESC's shady motives. Marathon's intertwined narrative and progression is whip-smart, leaving me as invested in its world as I am its beautiful, beautiful loot.

Still, don't expect to hold onto your gear for long. Marathon has three maps currently available to raid and are relatively small in comparison to many extraction shooter locales, meaning players can collapse on each other with varying degrees of ruthlessness. Starting zone Perimeter is divided by an alien-infested barrier with only a few ways through, creating claustrophobic chokepoints, while Dire Marsh is flatter and more open – lending itself well to longer-range playstyles. Outpost, alternately, is Marathon at its most violent: not only is it the smallest map, but it's baited with valuable goodies at its center and intermittently forces players indoors with searing flames that rain down from the sky.

Anything you take into a raid is lost permanently upon death, and there's a long line of potential killers to avoid. Points of interest are guarded by UESC soldiers, which force players to constantly weigh risk versus reward. They are a threat in their own right – their ranks ranging from lowly grunts to hulking mech-like commanders, all of whom can collapse on a trespasser in an instant – but the most terrifying prospect of all is making noise, as the sound of gunfire is all-but guaranteed to draw opportunistic players to your location.

While getting into a fight with UESC can quickly devolve into a desperate wave shooter, player versus player (PvP) combat is decided near-instantaneously. Time-to-kill (TTK) in Marathon is incredibly low, and while you can tip the odds in your favor by bringing in better gear – higher-quality shields to protect your health bar, for example, or a pricey thermal sight on your sniper – fights often come down to which Runner gets the drop on their target.

I was initially skeptical of Marathon's blink-and-you'll-miss-it PvP, but soon learned that if you're on the wrong end of it, you probably did something to deserve it before a shot was fired. Runs in Marathon have a very cerebral flow, and situational awareness is paramount. You can get far on Tau Ceti through audio cues alone. Human footsteps sound nothing like the machine-stomp of UESC, vents clank loudly if someone climbs through them, and AI enemies scream loudly upon spotting a Runner – a sound often followed by gunfire. Savvy players will likely spend more time setting up ambushes than pulling the trigger, resulting in long stretches of tension before the world explodes. My only bugbear is that I've had problems with inconsistent sound since Marathon's first patch, with audio levels and direction not always lining up with their sources.

Steady aim

Despite Marathon's ferocity, there are countless variables you can draw upon to tip the scales in your favor. Each of Marathon's seven Shells have unique abilities, with each supporting their own playstyles. Thief has a grappling hook, a drone that can steal items from inventories, and an x-ray visor – perfect for solo players who want to get in, loot valuables or a quest item needed for a contract, and get out. Assassin operates in a similar space, but with its smoke grenades and invisibility, can lean on repositioning to be played more confrontationally. Others are more straightforward: Triage can remotely revive allies, for example, while Vandal's movement buffs are lethal in the hands of twitchier shooter fans.

Then there are the guns themselves. Bungie has been devilishly creative here, taking a similar approach to Shells wherein if everything is broken, nothing is broken. I'm a huge fan of the V22 Volt Thrower, a submachine gun with lock-on aiming that works wonderfully for shooting targets in Assassin's smoke clouds, but every weapon has defined strengths and weaknesses. The Volt Thrower's damage is on the lower side compared to other SMGs, while guns like LMGs and precision rifles trade slower rates of fire for incredible bursts of damage. Each gun feels punchy to fire (a relief, as I rarely find shooting satisfying in games with shielding mechanics) and I find myself using a fairly even spread of weapons across raids, driven partly by what I have available in my Vault – where the items you extract with are stored – and how aggressively I want to play.

Gun mods can be found in-raid or bought from vendors, and can dramatically alter a weapon's profile. Modding isn't as in-depth as Escape from Tarkov, which sees players customizing their guns down to the smallest detail, but for that I'm grateful. You can kit out your character and jump into a raid within minutes, which works well with Marathon's smaller maps and flash fire encounters. After all, it's hard to stay salty when you can be back in the action so quickly. This, I think, is one of Marathon's greatest achievements. The moreish intensity of combat is too quick to get too hung up on losing gear – though some deaths certainly sting more than others – while smart quality-of-life features like automated item storage and generous Vault space minimize the extraction shooter genre's equivalent to paperwork.

That said, I do wish that Marathon's user interface was more intuitive. Your loadout, Vault, Shell selection, cosmetic customization, and vendors are all bundled into one row of menus; while your upgrades and contracts for every faction are separated into another. It can be finicky to check your contract while gearing up, which requires going back to the main menu and then into factions, and even after 60 hours I still trip myself up in finding what I need to find. Likewise, it can be difficult to identify items at a glance or compare mods and weapon stats. The same is true in-raid, as trying to read what weapon mods or stat-affecting implants do is incompatible with Marathon's pace. Granted, Bungie has the unenviable task of conveying significant amounts of depth and information, but its current state feels inelegant.

It's taken me longer than it should have to write this review. Part of that is because Marathon is built to last for a long time, which means there's a lot to experience even before the game's currently-closed Cryo Archive map is released. But it's mostly because thinking about Marathon is all it takes for me to slip into another raid, watching moths weave my Shell as I wonder whether I'll kill another Runner with a smoke grenade and a knife in the back, or die near-instantly in a hail of bullets. Marathon is not for everybody, and I expect it to be divisive. PvP encounters may be too short to be satisfying for players who begrudge the preceding minutes of tip-toeing, and suppressing the urge to go into a UESC base guns-blazing will be unpalatable to some.

The extraction shooter itself is niche by nature, as few games ask you to put everything on the line. But after hundreds of hours spent in Escape from Tarkov, it's a relief to see Bungie lean into that niche rather than dilute it. Marathon captures the highest highs of extraction shooters, trims the finickiness that has kept casual players from engaging with the genre, and ties everything together with striking sci-fi flair. A firecracker wrapped in smoking silk, Bungie has created my favorite multiplayer shooter in years – and while I'll wait for Cryo Archive before putting a score down, I'm already staggered by the promise on Tau Ceti IV's surface.

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