The run-up to Marathon's release has been such a train wreck that it's easy to forget that the game might still be really good

If I were working in Bungie's marketing team right now, I think I'd be feeling the strain. Marathon's debut trailer made a powerful first impression back in May 2023. The art style was bold. The colour palette was sizzling. The soundtrack was classical-meets-Casio in the best way possible. But since then, the mood around Marathon has trended relentlessly downward, the vibes soured first by an art plagiarism scandal and then by an alpha playtest that prompted Bungie to indefinitely delay the game. At this point, the challenge facing Bungie is no longer just to release a great game. It also needs to entirely reset the narrative around its first new title in more than eight years.

So, let's momentarily put aside some of the setbacks and stumbles and look at Marathon with fresh eyes. It's an extraction shooter – one of those multiplayer pressure cookers in which you and your team of fellow Runners spawn into a map and scrounge as much loot as you can before heading for an extraction point. Safely skedaddle, and you get to keep everything you found. But if you're killed before reaching an exit (perforated by a rival squad, perhaps, or mulched by the robotic security forces that roam the surface of Tau Ceti IV) you lose everything, including the guns and gear you brought into the game with you. It's a genre that delivers ecstatic highs and crushing lows, all of which play out against a backbeat of relentless tension. And they were all on show throughout our Marathon hands-on session earlier in the year.

Starting pistol

With that structure in mind, let's consider some of the things that Bungie is historically good at, starting with combat. There is no game developer working today that makes shooting a gun feel better than Bungie. The exact means by which they achieve this, I suspect, is a trade secret to rival only the Colonel's 11 herbs and spices or the formula for WD40 in terms of confidentiality and impact. I'd wager that the process is a mix of lovingly handcrafted sound, animation, and design supported by some truly tedious spreadsheet work. But however they manage it, this is a studio that knows how to make pistols, and Battle Rifles, and Sunshots, and Outbreak Perfecteds that are a joy to fire and live long in the memory.

And this is no small matter. If, on day one, Marathon can rival or surpass the best gunplay of any extraction shooter to date, this alone would make it a sorely tempting proposition. But Marathon's playable characters have more than just guns at their disposal, and each of the selectable Runners boasts a toolkit of abilities to draw on as you pick the bones of Tau Ceti IV's colonies clean. Void, for instance, can briefly turn invisible in order to get the drop on enemy fireteams or to scurry away undetected. Blackbird, meanwhile, can make use of her Echo Pulse to detect enemies through walls and other solid objects. Exactly how customizable each of these Runners is remains to be definitively seen – during alpha testing they functioned much like the tightly defined heroes in a game like Overwatch 2 or Apex Legends. But Bungie has recently been referring more often to Runner 'shells', prompting some speculation that each may ultimately function more like a customisable class in the mode of Destiny 2. Yes please.

Bungie can also claim a world-class track record when it comes to environment design and the ability to create a sense of place. With the launch of Halo: Combat Evolved in 2001, they created a world so visually memorable and distinctive that we can still passionately argue about the artistic merits of two different remaster projects almost 25 years later. The Destiny series shares Halo's penchant for striking, saturated colour, but its environments make bolder use of angular, architectural forms. This means that even in the course of a quick lunchtime Destiny 2 strike, you can feel like a tiny bug scuttling through the inner workings of some vast machine. It all points to an exceptional talent for using environments to stoke and sustain a mood over time - even on aging console hardware and underpowered PCs.

Such a talent naturally lends itself to the extraction shooter genre, where the maps are generally fairly large in scope and fairly small in number. While Marathon's indoor environments – with their stark use of corporate minimalism and searing colour – so far suggest an art team playing to Bungie's historic strengths, the game's washed-out, hazy outdoor spaces don't yet inspire the same confidence. But there's one tantalizing game environment that we haven't seen at all so far, and that's the titular UESC Marathon.

This colossal structure is part-moon, part-spacecraft and was built to facilitate the multi-generational journey to the Tau Ceti system. Now, the vessel hangs above the dead colony like an eerie memorial. In gameplay terms, the Marathon looks set to serve as an endgame destination that's home to the most precious loot and the most lethal adversaries, as well as raid-like environmental puzzles and some kind of narrative layer that sheds light on the mysteries of Tau Ceti IV's collapse. Given how tight-lipped Bungie has so far been about this portion of the game, it's very possible that Marathon's greatest innovations are yet to be revealed.

If all that sounds overly optimistic, well, we'll soon know one way or another. Bungie has barely broken radio silence in the last few months, beyond confirming that they've completed the much-needed but not-especially-exciting work of adding proximity chat to the game. Soon, they will have to break cover and begin the work of re-revealing the game. And when they do, Marathon will meet an audience much less willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt than it might have been just a few short years ago.

But there's one other thing that Bungie has been pretty good at over the years, and that's comebacks. Ever since Destiny launched in 2014, Bungie has had to weather any number of storms – moments when a much-feted expansion missed the mark, when the game's population was waning, when player sentiment was in freefall. For more than 10 years, Bungie has heroically held up the occasionally-crumbling building, pausing only to step on a rake every 6-18 months or so. It would be unwise to count them out too soon.

And there's still a chance that Marathon really will deliver something special – that the company once responsible for Combat Evolved, Halo 3, and Forsaken can work its indefinable gunplay alchemy in the high-stakes extraction genre. Perhaps the biggest question at this point is whether Bungie will have banked enough goodwill for players to give them the chance.

Want to get into the extraction shooter genre? In our Arc Raiders review, we loved it for how approachable it is to get into.