Marathon Review – A Technical Nightmare in Cyberpunk Colors

What is Marathon exactly?

Marathon was supposed to be the grand return of a legendary IP and Bungie’s answer to the rising popularity of extraction shooters like Arc Raiders. The studio that gave us Halo and Destiny attempted to graft its world-class action onto hardcore looting and survival mechanics. However, the result in its current state is a cautionary tale of how an ambitious project can fail when technical polish and basic world readability are neglected.

While the game tries to lure players with high stakes and adrenaline-fueled loot runs, the reality of 17 hours played is one of pure frustration. The “high-stakes looting deathmatch” concept only works if the game doesn’t trip the player up with its own broken architecture. While Bungie can still craft a great shooting feel, in Marathon, this element is wrapped in so many layers of problems that it is difficult to actually enjoy.

Visually, the game aims for a unique transhumanist aesthetic that looks great in screenshots but fails miserably in motion. The stylistic choice here clashes with functionality. The color palette and character designs cause everything to bleed into a single, unreadable smudge, which is a cardinal sin in a genre where life is decided by milliseconds and target identification.

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Story & Atmosphere

The atmosphere of Marathon is undeniably spooky and unsettling, which was clearly the intention. The cyberpunk visuals combined with strange metaphors for immortality create a unique “vibe.” Unfortunately, this atmosphere is constantly shattered by technical shortcomings. It is hard to immerse yourself in deep lore when the game crashes right before the end of a mission, causing you to lose all progress.

The story is told through factions and snippets of post-mission dialogue, which could be interesting if the game didn’t constantly suffer from bad geometry. It frequently happens that your character gets caught on a piece of texture while trying to soak in the atmosphere or escape enemies. Mantling is incredibly unreliable and, combined with severe fall damage, creates a deadly cocktail that reliably yanks you out of any immersive experience.

The biggest issue, however, is the visual chaos. The game uses a hero shooter model with classes like Assassin or Triage, but their silhouettes are so generic and similar to enemy NPCs in the heat of battle that you often fire at anything that moves, only to find you’ve wasted precious ammo on a robot while a real player is standing three feet away. This inability to distinguish live players from AI is a fatal flaw in a PvPvE game.

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Gameplay & Mechanics

Shooting is the only thing that truly works in Marathon. The gunplay from Bungie is legendary, and you feel every shot, recoil, and bullet impact here. Bullet magnetism and tuned projectile speeds give you the feeling that you are better at combat than you actually are. Sadly, that “four-second loop of perfection” the developers talk about is broken by everything else happening in the game.

Movement is clunky. You constantly have to monitor the Heat gauge, which is essentially a stamina meter. If you overheat, you become a “sluggish blob,” which, combined with the unreadable terrain, leads to a quick death. RPG elements and looting are buried under atrocious menus. The inventory is a messy jumble of identical icons. Want to swap a weapon mod? You have to hover over every single icon because they look exactly the same. In the heat of combat, such equipment management is practically impossible.

Another stumbling block is the missions. Objectives are so poorly explained that you often just wander the map looking for a single floating marker representing your task. For newcomers, onboarding in Marathon is a nightmare. The game explains almost nothing, and complex upgrade trees require hours of study just to understand which item you need to progress. This artificial difficulty through player confusion is not a challenge—it’s bad design.

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Final Verdict

Marathon is currently in a painful state. On one hand, you have brilliant shooting mechanics and amazing sound design; on the other, a pile of technical garbage and design flaws. Just because a game looks stylish doesn’t excuse the fact that it is, in many moments, simply unplayable. Backtracking due to poorly explained quests and constant snagging on world geometry makes playing feel like a chore rather than fun.

The most frustrating part is the feeling that a great game is hidden under all this grime. But the moment the game crashes in the middle of a firefight, or when you die simply because you couldn’t tell a player from an NPC, all patience ends. Bungie has a massive amount of work ahead of them if they want Marathon to become a staple in the extraction shooter field.

At its current price and in this state, Marathon cannot be recommended to anyone but the most die-hard studio fans willing to tolerate a technical hell for the price of a few minutes of good gunplay. For everyone else, it is currently a chaotic, confusing, and technically unfinished product that needs at least another year of intensive development.

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FAQ

Q: Is Marathon free-to-play?
A: No, the game has a $40 price tag, which is a very bold decision given its current technical state and design flaws.

Q: Are there different character classes?
A: Yes, Marathon uses a hero system (e.g., Assassin or Triage), but their identities are very unclear in combat and feel generic.

Q: How technically unstable is the game?
A: During testing, we experienced frequent crashes, characters getting stuck in textures, and server connection issues that often resulted in lost loot.

Q: Can a newcomer to the genre understand Marathon?
A: With great difficulty. Tutorials are almost non-existent, and the UI is extremely chaotic and hostile to new players.

Q: Why is it so hard to tell players apart from NPCs?
A: Due to the chosen visual style and color palette, player characters and enemies have very similar silhouettes that blend together in dark or visually busy environments.