Marathon‘s Server Slam was a strange experience for me. I went in with all expectations swept aside, a clean operating table on which I could dig through the guts and bones of Bungie’s upcoming extraction shooter, sterilised from pre-conceived scepticism and optimism alike. After around 20 hours with the game over the weekend I can tear off my gloves and say with confidence Marathon is riddled with premium, top-shelf Bungie gunplay.
It must be said that my first few hours with Marathon were shaky, at best. I was enraptured by the maps – the bold contrasting colours lathered all over Marathon’s desolate structures and lonely wildernesses – but my wanderlust came to a sudden halt every time I had to navigate the inventory. I felt 80-years-old, at times, leaning into my monitor to identify which pouch of NuCaloric injectable slime did what, trying to spot visual differences between weapon modifications and clumsily struggling to equip them to my alternative gun.
But I powered through it, as it seems many people did. After a while, you learn to parse the minute differences in items, the improve the speed at which you can shift around your inventory, and you start to feel it. Marathon clicks with you in an instant, and for each of us, that instant will be different. For me it was after coming to blows with an Assassin in The Hauler.
His invisibility ability reflected light as he sprinted toward me through the central hall and its inky, lavender glow. A panicked assault rifle spray illuminated his shell, allowing me to swat down him just in time, culminating in a knife to the chest to tie a bow on the moment. Here I realized what Marathon was; a celebration of sci-fi ultra-violence. Bungie’s history of making fantastic FPS weapons in fantastic FPS games, refined and saturated. 30 years of experience boiled down to a few riveting seconds.
Fighting in Marathon is fast and fierce. Ignore the naysayers: the Time-to-kill is just perfect – shields break in a fraction of a second with this ear-pleasing crumble, and getting the jump on somebody is a surefire way to snap them out of a game before they can turn their mic on to yell expletives at you. One-on-one fights are where these nail-biting encounters can be found in their rawest form, resulting in Marathon’s solo queue experience being, arguably, as attractive as playing with full squads. The slower-paced solitary experience is broken by sharp incisions of action.
I must give some credit to the characters themselves, shells that provide their own combat, navigation, and disruption abilities that flavour an already rich FPS. Movement is fluid and energetic, and very rarely are you stationary in a fight with another player. Even the slower options like Destroyer have air thrusters and a tactical sprint, allowing this aggressive shell to quickly push an advantage and chase down hurt players in a pinch.
You know what it feels like? It feels a lot like Apex Legends, bizarrely, especially when playing in a squad of three with each player using their skills to look for cracks in other squads’ armour. You may not have ziplines or Jump Towers, but your capabilities as a player to navigate your surroundings has echoes of Respawn’s own sci-fi experiment.
If there’s a secret ingredient to Marathon, it’s the weapons themselves, a sentence I am sure will activate Bungie old-heads like they’re walking into a childhood home. Marathon’s arsenal is littered with individual audio/visual masterclasses dipping back into old faithful archetypes, spruced up in Marathon’s blunt-force grab-bag aesthetic.
Take the V11 Punch, a common Volt-type weapon. It shoots low-powered energy blasts if you tap the trigger, but hold it down for a few seconds and it jettisons a larger, super-charged projectile that eats up ammo but will tear through an enemy shield. Sound familiar? It’s the Halo energy pistol. It may not look the same, but it’s got that same cathartic kick-back on the charged blast, the projectile itself even travels through the air in the same manner. When I first tried it out for myself you should have heard the yelp I made. You’ll find Marathon takes nostalgic strides quite often with its weapons. The longshot, the WSTR Combat Shotgun… They all harken back to some of Bungie’s best, most idiosyncratic work.
There are little sprinkles of lavish detail added to the mix that just enhance the whole experience, too. The flash of a little digital skull when you kill a downed player combines with a cyberized sound invocating a computer being suddenly and unceremoniously turned off. Which, hey, is what you’ve done to these simulacrum’s, in a very dystopian sense. The hit marker giving off this pleasing twing when you hit a headshot… it all adds a lot to the overall experience.
I booted up the Server Slam at 8PM on Sunday night then, lo and behold, it was 1AM. If Arc Raiders convinced you that extraction shooters are for good vibes and collaboration, well… I can’t see that happening here. At least not in my games. And not because Marathon doesn’t have the tools to allow for such wholesome moments, but because shooting other players is too damn fun. You can’t place a Bungie shotgun in someone’s hand and not expect them to use it.
When the game launches in a few days, I urge you to stick with it. There may just be some of Bungie’s best work buried beneath the surface in Marathon. And I can’t wait to dig it out.