A few days after the release of Marathon, the community’s opinion of the new Bungie shooter seems to have changed fundamentally. On Steam, the game has a user score of almost 90 percent.
Just a few weeks ago, things were looking bad for Marathon. Even before its release, Bungie’s new extraction shooter was met with a wave of skepticism from the community – mainly due to its idiosyncratic art style.
Many players are also wondering whether the shooter market, already considered oversaturated, can tolerate yet another colorful offshoot of the genre, or whether Marathon is doomed to failure like its unfortunate predecessors, Concord and Highguard.
Marathon has been on the market since March 5, and a completely different picture of the new Bungie shooter is now emerging. That’s because the
Just four days after the launch of Marathon, Steam has already received over 20,000 user reviews. And they speak for themselves. Around 89 percent of global reviews for Marathon are positive, and in German-speaking countries, Marathon even exceeds 90 percent.
While there is some criticism of the confusing user interface and the room for improvement in terms of balancing, most reviewers agree that Marathon is a promising shooter with great potential.
The crisp gunplay and fresh design are particularly praised.
However, many users also hope that Marathon will improve on its current pain points with updates in the future.
Why does Marathon rank so differently on Metacritic?
On the review aggregator Metacritic , Marathon currently has a user score of only 5.1. However, if you take a closer look at these reviews, it becomes clear that most of them are unqualified review bombing. The reviewers in question have most likely not played Marathon and simply want to vent their frustration about the game’s art style.
In addition, only 700 reviews have been collected on Metacritic so far. In contrast to the mass of Steam reviews, this is not really meaningful.
And what about the player numbers?
Marathon’s player numbers are also quite impressive for a game that many had already written off before its launch. According to Steam-DB, around 88,000 people played Marathon simultaneously at launch. Over the weekend, the peak player numbers remained stable at around 75,000.
This means that Marathon cannot yet catch up with current shooter heavyweights such as Arc Raiders, Deadlock, and Marvel Rivals in terms of daily active users – but these figures are not bad either, as Marathon is currently among the most played titles on Steam. The question now remains whether publisher Sony sees it that way too, or whether it had hoped for more from Marathon.
