Marathon review: "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 reasons to sink beneath Marathon's sinew and cable – and after 75 hours, I've stopped thinking about anything else.

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.

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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 Evangelion'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 four maps to raid, all relatively small in comparison to many extraction shooter locales, meaning players can collapse on each other with varying degrees of ruthlessness. 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.

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 is smaller than both, but it's baited with valuable goodies at its center and intermittently forces players indoors with searing flames that rain down from the sky.

But it's Cryo Archive – a Destiny-style raid with added player versus player (PvP) combat – that shows Marathon at its deadliest. The map offers the best loot in the game, but is only playable at weekends and requires bringing a loadout worth at least 5,000 credits – in part a necessity to survive its tougher foes. I like the dynamic that Cryo Archive's limited availability creates. For every squad that escapes with credits and gold-tier gear, more lose a chunk of their vault to the meat grinder; while the ante for queueing up for Cryo Archive means players have something to save their gear for beyond cosplaying as Hauler's strongest soldier.

It's a clever way of pacing Marathon's meta-game between season wipes, and I'm already planning to spend this week recouping my losses before hitting Cryo Archive again at the weekend. That said, I do wish there was more done for solo players here: Cryo Archive is the only map that can't be played alone, which retroactively makes solo play feel like an afterthought in the other maps – despite it being very satisfying with the right playstyle.

Steady aim

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.

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 playstyle. 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 underrated 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 75 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.

More than any other shooter in recent years, Marathon has consumed me entirely. The depth of Marathon's maps, set against the simplicity of its violence, make for intoxicating bursts of dopamine. It's crushing to have your loot seized, but escaping with a full backpack that other players couldn't take from you nourishes the ego.

The extraction shooter itself is niche by nature, as few games ask you to put everything on the line. PvP encounters will be too brief and punishing for players who don't click with Marathon's ingrained risk, nor will the importance of stealth. But after hundreds of hours spent in Escape from Tarkov, it's a relief to see Bungie lean into the genre's difficulty 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.

The rollout of Cryo Archive – from the community's efforts to unlock it, to the map itself – shows potential for Bungie to further play with Marathon's meta pacing, and it feels like we've barely scratched the surface of Tau Ceti IV's story. But most promising of all is how often I find myself thinking about Marathon, be it the contracts I'm planning routes for, the herculean task of replenishing my vault after a weekend of disastrous Cryo Archive runs, or puzzling over scraps of lore I routinely mine the codex for. Bungie has repurposed the extraction shooter formula for its own absorbing world, an excellent shooter with the bones of an RPG. Marathon is worth dying for – but it's better if you live.

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