Bungie has always put its creativity at the forefront of its games, and Marathon delivers a brand new creative world to explore. It is refreshing to see Bungie express its multiplayer interactive game design in a brand new way. Is this one of 2026’s best shooters?
Multiplayer excellence
Although the multiplayer landscape has changed many times over the last 25 years, Bungie is still keeping up. The extraction shooter is Bungie’s first game in the decade, its first extraction shooter, and its first game since being bought by PlayStation. Despite how new all of this may be, there was a core to hold onto and grow from, and that core is Bungie itself. The gunplay, world design, music, and so many other details about the game come together in a way that shows just how much effort went into designing the game.
In both Halo and Destiny, the multiplayer community was a massive part of how players interacted with the game. In the age of proximity voice-chat, this is continued with Marathon. Though video game communities are no longer the high-enthusiasm sectors they used to be, thanks to easy access to communication in the modern age, there was still a relatively new popular feature for Bungie to implement. The voice chatting with teammates, being able to help each other complete missions in the order you choose, choosing when to pick fights, and especially learning new things about maps, weapons, enemies, lore, and so on, are all reasons to keep coming back to the game.
Extraction shooters are hard, both punishing and rewarding. Not everybody is going to enjoy the hostile nature of the community when it sometimes feels personal, since fighting other players isn’t necessarily required. It does, however, create a rare immersion and involvement with the game that many games can’t achieve without a ranked system. The more you play, the more your investment in the game will grow. This feedback loop fuels both the growth of the player and the growth of the game.
Features and functionality
Marathon launched with a satisfying introduction to the content of the game, and very quickly expanded on it. From the Server Slam to the release of the game, we saw new runner shells available to be played, as well as a new map with increased difficulty and unique mechanics. Two weeks later, not only was there a polish on existing features (i.e. bugfixes, balancing, storage consolidation), but a massive expansion of content with an entire new map with extremely elevated mechanics compared to others, and a ranked mode. Even ranked itself has unique mechanics that cement it as an identifiable game, and not just another of a genre.
While there are many unique features and elements, Marathon stays true to what an extraction shooter is, not stepping too far off the line and losing any of the core features that make the genre work. There are free kits to encourage less risky runs, the Rook shell that allows players to go into trios lobbies alone and try to extract loot (once again at low risk), heart-pounding extractions, many map events to learn the mechanics of, and so much more of what makes extraction-shooter exciting. Marathon may even be the game of the genre that leans into that high intensity the most. There are no moments of light-hearted relief. There is only tension and emerging victorious from it. There is only surviving, or not.
Cy-fi genrefication
For lovers of cyberpunk and/or science fiction, there is a genre marriage taking place to satisfy all of your plot and setting cravings. While leaning much more into the cyberpunk style as the known quantity, there are many science-fiction elements in the unknown world that is constantly being discovered by the players as they uncover secrets about the lost colony. The UESC’s DNA is in the player characters, in the structures of the environments, in the factions that are interacted with; they all show ties to the Earth and Mars colonies that are considered the home worlds of the human population. High-tech cyberspace interactions and integrations show the advancements in the world of Marathon versus our own. Tau Ceti IV, however, shakes this up.
Tau Ceti IV, the planet that the UESC Marathon was sent to in order to colonize, has similar biomes to Earth, but very different biology. Overgrown ticks that sacrifice themselves to harm a foe, plants that shoot spores to melt their predators, and some very unusual anomalies are a few of the encounters that runners experience across Tau Ceti IV. They add just as much to the horror of the game as any of the UESC elements, making up the other half of every environment, sometimes in the skybox, and sometimes right beneath your feet.
A worldbuilding masterpiece
The absolute only thing wrong with the worldbuilding for the Marathon universe is how much more of it almost every player will be craving once they play. There is so much content in the menus alone, especially as logs get unlocked, and you actively dig out information to be discovered about Tau Ceti IV and the fate of the UESC Marathon. Completing some missions rewards you with more than just in-game loot, also providing you with dialogue from faction representatives who begin to not only represent groups as a figurehead, but have individual traits to make them distinct. Last but not least are the introduction cutscenes for each faction representative. Bungie better have more of these cooking, because it seems they were the hook for every single player to get locked into the game and realize there was an entire world being cooked up here.
The soundtracks for Marathon feel like the final piece of a massive puzzle that pulls everything together. The separation between UESC and Tau Ceti IV becomes blurred lines as the soundtrack gives life to these individual locations where both have become part of each other. Spending time in the vault — a key aspect to every extraction shooter — becomes an experience of its own as the music swells in the background, holding your excitement and elevating it for the upcoming run. Factions are immediately understood both through visuals, dialogue with other faction members, and the intensity of the music, whether high or low, all tie together a perfect understanding of what these entities represent in the world of Marathon.
A new place to call home
Games like Marathon that find the perfect place between a genre’s inception and its high point are once in a generation. The online multiplayer landscape is full of competition, but extraction shooters are hard to make and take a long time to develop. Bungie found the sweet spot. The studio took its time with a rising and developing genre, putting its golden touch on it and refusing to let “live-service” mean “monetization first.” Finally, there is an extraction shooter that not only competitively inclined gamers can enjoy, but narrative-loving players as well. There is a crossover here that takes an immense amount of polish, quality, and consistency to pull off. There has not been an extraction shooter to date, nor many online multiplayer games in the 2020s that have achieved what Marathon has. Dip your toe in, get swallowed up, and welcome to Marathon.
Marathon is out now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
