Marathon: A Stylishly Merciless Video Game Built for Cut-Throat Times
A tremendous amount rides on the success of Marathon, the latest multiplayer online shooter from Halo creator Bungie. This DayGlo spectacular transports players to the distant planet Tau Ceti IV, a world mired in an endless, brutal battle for precious resources. In rare quiet moments, you might find yourself captivated by the iridescent beauty of this fictional world, with its powdery pink skies and lurid green vegetation set against supermassive architecture adorned with ultra-stylish neon graphics.
Beauty Matched by Brutality
Yet admire the scenery for a split second too long and you'll likely catch a bullet, causing your character to bleed an unsettling blue substance. In these moments, the camera locks, forcing you to stare down at your character's unceremonious demise. Marathon's considerable visual beauty is matched only by its clinical, unforgiving brutality.
The road to Marathon's release has been long and contentious. This extraction shooter—where players must shoot and loot as much as possible before escaping each level—was first revealed in 2022 with a stunning trailer that showed tiny robotic bugs weaving synthetic bodies into existence. The game looked uniquely weird for a blockbuster shooter, exciting both shooter veterans and art-game enthusiasts.
A Troubled Development Path
However, the mood soon soured. Marathon became entangled in an artwork-theft scandal, and feedback from an April 2025 alpha playtest was so negative that the game, originally scheduled for September 2024, was delayed indefinitely. During this period, another extraction shooter called Arc Raiders launched to critical acclaim and massive sales success.
Marathon now arrives with much to prove, particularly as Bungie's first new release since Sony acquired the studio for $3.6 billion in 2022. Sony faces its own pressures, having invested hundreds of millions—if not billions—into an online multiplayer strategy that has produced just one major hit, Helldivers 2, alongside numerous cancellations and one spectacularly expensive failure.
The Marathon Experience
With its thrilling kinetic gunplay, tantalizing sci-fi setting, and encouraging initial player feedback, Marathon might yet reverse Sony's fortunes. Players assume the role of Runners—contract-chasing freelancers whose consciousness has been uploaded into artificial bodies. While this body-swapping premise technically allows escape from death, it's hardly desirable immortality. These gun-toting bio-cybernetic beings remain trapped in an endless purgatorial conflict on Tau Ceti IV, mere grist for the mill in the cosmic wilderness.
A typical run might begin in Dire Marsh, a wet, gaseous level that perfectly embodies its miserable name. Your crew makes a beeline for a maintenance area, tasked with finding a mysterious metal rod. While searching, you fight successive deployments of mech enemies, getting downed and revived multiple times. After five frustrating minutes of fruitless searching, you head toward an exit only to encounter other Runners with the same idea. A brief, heart-racing gunfight ensues, culminating in another player stabbing you in the chest while shouting "Mr Silly" through their microphone.
Relentless and Demoralizing Gameplay
Marathon's gameplay loop proves relentless and frequently demoralizing, more so than its rival Arc Raiders. Arc Raiders' genius lies in facilitating different dramatic tones during human encounters, where players within range can hear each other and negotiate before or during combat. Outcomes depend not just on marksmanship and gear but on generosity of spirit and smooth talking, with de-escalation being as viable as armed violence.
Marathon, by contrast, feels less dynamic and interesting. Verbal discussions always take a backseat to brute force, with seemingly no one interested in cooperation. Everyone appears to be in it for themselves, a dynamic encouraged by the game's speculative dystopian concept. For newcomers to extraction shooters, the question becomes whether they'll grow fatigued with such a dog-eat-dog experience.
A Mirror of Our Times
After fifteen hours of play, Bungie's latest creation becomes compelling precisely because of its ruthlessness. Much like how Among Us captured pandemic-era paranoia, Marathon mirrors the times that produced it. We live in a mean-spirited, cut-throat era where too many world events feel driven by pernicious self-interest. This game offers players a way to work through this cynical state of affairs: either you're the one pulling the trigger, or you're bleeding out with a mouthful of dirt.
Marathon is now available on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation 5 for £34.99.
