Marathon isn’t a bad game, but it is a tragic one.

No game is currently as hotly debated as Bungie’s Marathon. We’ve already played it extensively and can well understand the controversy.

It seems easy to hang Marathon out to dry. For months, it has been scaring people away with its unusual look, and Bungie is obviously chasing the current extraction shooter trends, charging an entry price of $40 on top of all the microtransaction hype after release.

But that’s just the tip of an iceberg that has been growing for months. Marathon already had a plagiarism scandal, emergency brakes had to be pulled and massive changes announced even before release, and many fans suspect another Concord or Highguard disaster. And Bungie’s reputation is already at a record low: after massive layoffs and major mistakes with new updates and DLCs, Destiny 2 is in worse shape than ever before.

Marathon is currently free to play. In the so-called Server Slam, you can explore three maps of the extraction shooter in almost their entirety a few days before release. And many people are angry. YouTube is full of headlines like “Game Over for Marathon,” “Bungie’s Downfall,” and “Disgusting Slop.”

But there is also opposition – and plenty of it. Many fans are defending Marathon tooth and nail, praising the game’s strengths and resisting premature judgment based on all the bad omens. It’s been a long time since a shooter has been so hotly debated in the community.

And that naturally makes me curious! So I dive into Server Slam myself and, after a weekend, already have almost 10 hours of playtime under my belt. And indeed, I’ve found much more enjoyment than expected. And significantly more problems than hoped for.

Marathon’s problems: Menus

Let’s talk about the tragic side first: Technically, Marathon is Bungie’s worst game – by far. Apart from the actual gunplay (more on that in a moment), I have to search with a magnifying glass for the production genius that made Halo so immortal and Destiny so successful. Sure, I’ll find it somewhere in the nooks and crannies, but Marathon has forgotten so much of what Halo knew over 25 years ago.

A concrete example: everything in Marathon that has to do with conveying information is a disaster. Many people will run away screaming within the first 20 minutes because of this. And I’m not just talking about the menus, but also the menus.

Somehow, all AAA shooter studios seem to be forgetting how good menus work – we saw it with Call of Duty, Battlefield 6, and now Marathon. You maneuver your way through a daunting jumble of ugly tiles, index cards, and incomprehensible icons. For example, this is what one of the upgrade screens looks like:

The story is presented in dull slideshow cutscenes or walls of text like this:

Sure, other extraction shooters don’t necessarily shine as Spielbergian masterpieces of staging, but we’re talking about a studio that 16 years ago staged the demise of Reach so unforgettably that you only have to show Halo fans a cracked helmet and they burst into tears.

But the lousy menus are Marathon’s smallest problem. As dull as everything may seem here, over time I learn the paths by heart and know how to get into the game. The big problems come after that.

Marathon’s problems: player guidance

All extraction shooters face the challenge of having to convey tons of information to their players in a flash. They enter a room and have to immediately see which cabinets, safes, and suitcases can be looted. They rummage through a shot enemy and have to immediately separate the wheat from the chaff, because the clock is ticking. While you’re checking inventories, you yourself are a defenseless victim.

Every extraction shooter deals with this in a different way. Hunt: Showdown almost completely dispenses with loot. Despite its sci-fi setting, Arc Raiders uses fairly classic designs – such as World War II-style weapons – to remain easy to understand. And Arena Breakout sorts enemy inventories into different areas so that I know immediately: I’ll find ammunition in the chest rig, valuable stuff in the backpack, the helmet on the head, and so on.
Marathon simply throws everything together here. For comparison:

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To make matters worse, Marathon’s minimalist art style means that I can’t intuitively recognize what almost any of the icons are supposed to be. Here’s an example of different weapon attachments side by side:

I’m giving you such a detailed explanation here to clearly illustrate that Marathon’s broken information transfer is more than just poor interface design. It actively gets in the way of the game flow. And this loot presentation is just one problem among many. Here are a few (!) more examples:

• Your teammates don’t just have their names above their heads, but A1, B2, and C3. Which is doubly nonsensical, because there is no C1 or C2, so A, B, and C would be completely sufficient, and besides… just show me the names of my teammates so I can quickly assign callouts!
• When I activate an extract, I don’t see a timer anywhere showing how many seconds until the exfiltration begins.
• Have fun finding the one terminal you need to hack for a quest in a gigantic facility full of flashing displays. You only get the quest marker when you’re right in front of your target.
• One quest that is currently causing the community a lot of headaches: You are supposed to find rod items in the armory of a huge facility, but you a) don’t know what an armory looks like, b) don’t know what the item looks like, and c) don’t know where it is.
• The German translation is still quite flawed. Even locations on the map are translated differently depending on the quest text.

And I haven’t even mentioned the elephant in the room: the art style, which takes some getting used to, along with the massive fog of war on all maps, means that in Marathon I often literally can’t see what’s going on. Everything flashes, sparkles, and beeps, the oversaturated colors create an incredibly restless image, and every game starts with such garish strobe effects that it feels like your graphics card is about to burn out. People in my squad actively get headaches from Marathon’s color storm. And then many of the facilities you explore look pretty much the same.

Sure, these are all issues that you can mostly overcome with patience and a lot of memorization, but Marathon can’t really afford so much friction in the first few hours of gameplay in such a highly competitive subgenre. And we’re still not done with the problems yet.

The problems with Marathon: Balance

Marathon works best when it’s allowed to be what it wants to be: a fast-paced loot shooter with a focus on exciting PvP battles, in which Bungie’s gunplay can show why it’s among the best in the genre. Currently, however, the uneven balance still stands in the way of this too much.

An example: Marathon’s AI opponents hit like Mike Tyson in the 90s. Unlike in Arc Raiders, bots are not really the focus of the game; they are just there to distract you a little, as they hardly drop any interesting loot. But they pursue you relentlessly, often spawn right next to you, and laser you like the Death Star, so that in many matches you have already used up all your shield and healing items before you encounter the first real human.

All environmental hazards in Marathon seem overpowered in terms of their “lethality.” For example, if you stumble into a poisonous plant during a battle, you might as well pack it in. Don’t get me wrong: an extraction shooter can of course offer deadly surroundings, but Marathon’s PvP battles are already so intense with an extremely low “time to kill” that it’s incredibly frustrating how often I die due to environmental bad luck, for example because some bot has spawned behind me again.

And why is it still fun despite that?

I deliberately listed all these problems in great detail first to make it clear that I’m not just some deluded fanboy when I say: I like Marathon. I really like Marathon. So much so that I actually want to keep playing without interruption.

Because after the first few hours of getting used to it, all the construction sites and problems fade away and the game can show off its real strengths:

• The look: Yes, the art design, which takes some getting used to, may have a negative effect on player guidance and visibility, but I think it’s great how fresh Marathon feels within the shooter sci-fi genre. The whole style is strongly reminiscent of the old System Shocks, with over-stylized hacker punk instead of the usual military gray-brown.
• The atmosphere: Especially when playing solo, Marathon sometimes feels like half a horror game. As in Armored Core 6, I act as a robot shell, interacting only with spider-like, faceless megacorps on a deserted colony somewhere in no man’s land. If you pause and take a look at the stories the environment actually tells, you’ll find an amazingly exciting game world.
• PvP: The shootouts in Marathon are great fun, and Bungie’s strengths here are just as evident as they were in Halo. Each weapon has clear strengths and weaknesses, the “time to kill” is quite low, and the game is really good in human-versus-human multiplayer.

In general, Marathon hits a sweet spot for me that no other extraction shooter can match: thanks to the fast movement and even faster shooting, the matches are much more entertaining than Arena Breakout or Tarkov, and I also prefer the PvP focus to the cozy PvE pacifism of Arc Raiders. The maps strike a nice balance between large and compact, allowing me to quickly get into the action, but also to avoid it if I want to. Marathon is a really good and fresh shooter, but that’s the tragedy: many people will never get to see it because all the problems (understandably) scare them away. What’s more, I’m very skeptical that the game will be able to find its place in the competitive extraction shooter landscape with such major points of friction, a steep entry price, a look that takes some getting used to, and competition that – and I’m speculating here that the server slam issues won’t be fixed in four days – has had a much smoother launch.