Marathon Launch Review: Bungie’s extraction shooter is a hostile beast worth taming

It’s impossible to divorce Marathon from the context surrounding its development.

In July 2024, merely a month after Bungie culminated years of narrative in Destiny 2 with The Final Shape, 220 staff were laid off. As the studio continued development on the longstanding shooter, the attention on Marathon — an extraction shooter set in the same universe as the studio’s namesake series from the late 90s — has been mired in complications.

This precedent, one that spans layoffs, management changes, and a significant delay, is reflected in the version of Marathon that launched last week. It’s a shooter with a graceful visual presentation and the top-notch gunfeel that has come to be expected from a studio with a long-standing legacy in the genre.

It’s also a shooter that is as alluring as it is unforgiving, pitting players against each other as they navigate hostile environments in pursuit of tantalizing loot, facing the ever-looming threat that death is always around the corner. The belligerent nature of Marathon reflects not only the past couple of years of Bungie but also the tumultuous landscape of other live service shooters that are also fighting for scraps of attention and a nomadic player base.

The odds against Marathon have manifested even within Bungie itself. In late 2024, the sentiment among staff around the release was reportedly “not great,” with some developers feeling pessimistic about the game hitting its initial 2025 deadline. This was followed by staff changes, a controversy surrounding art plagiarism, and a less-than-favorable reception to alpha tests that led to a delay.

The months since have been equally grim — in a call with investors, Sony, which acquired Bungie in 2022, said the studio’s independence was “getting lighter.” Then, both the studio CEO and Marathon’s art director parted ways with the company months before the launch.

Runner Shells in Marathon are almost as threatened and expendable. Functioning as classes, each Runner has its own abilities and traits — favoring strength, agility, sneakiness, and so on. Storywise, they’re essentially empty bodies meant to be discarded and replaced, functioning solely thanks to a consciousness that is moved from one to the other.

It all makes sense, considering death is swift and merciless, with the slightest miscalculation costing an entire match — a fate that results in you losing all of the items and gear currently in your inventory. Marathon is not as punishing as the likes of Escape from Tarkov, but it shares more similarities with Hunt: Showdown 1896 than, say, Arc Raiders.

“The belligerent nature of Marathon reflects not only the past couple of years of Bungie but also the tumultuous landscape of other live service shooters”

The core of a match is essentially the same each time. Teams of up to three players descend into a selected map in search of loot. Each map is introduced with a specific difficulty level, based on both its design and the presence of non-player enemies. Matches tend to last around 25 minutes, so strategizing around time and which points of interest to scourge through is key.

At multiple moments, an exfil terminal will appear somewhere in the region, allowing players to activate an escape route that becomes available after some waiting time. If you’re able to make it out alive, you’ll get to retain all items in your possession. Fail to do so, and the game will kindly detail everything you’ve lost in the summary screen.

Even as someone who is familiar with the core loop of extraction shooters, the first couple of hours of Marathon were overwhelming. There’s a rather simple tutorial that teaches you the basics, but that effort isn’t shared in properly introducing the barrage of items and proper nouns thrown at you. Coming from Destiny 2, this isn’t too surprising — Marathon shares a similar DNA around the glorification of loot and forcing you to find specific items and resources to access certain upgrades, which can quickly become tedious considering the RNG nature of some collectibles.

Loot isn’t everything, yet it does play an important role in how you approach each expedition. You can gear up and create a loadout with the best items at your disposal to give yourself an advantage from the jump, albeit with the risk of a team smarting you and losing everything. Alternatively, there are numerous factions — which basically serve as Destiny NPCs granting bounties — that have sponsored kits.

These tend to include a primary weapon and a few items, and don’t allow you to add anything from your vault (your permanent storage). They’re a good way of leveling up your rank with said faction, and also provide a starter park of sorts that lowers the stakes. Yet, they tend to require you to more actively search for better loot to gain more survival chances.

Regardless of preparation, as well as which Runner you pick, it all comes down to quick reflexes and coming up with strategies. It’s not uncommon for matches to last only a few minutes if you encounter a tough player team early on. It’s not rare to lose 30 items in the blink of an eye.

“Regardless of preparation, as well as which Runner you pick, it all comes down to quick reflexes and coming up with strategies.”

Both the microdecisions you can make, as well as the multiplayer component with features like proximity chat, keep the experience engaging. Some of my favorite moments came from unexpected events, such as my teammates exfiltrating without me, forcing an even more daunting experience as a solo player, or managing to sneak upon a distracted group of players with a coordinated attack.

As defeating as failure can be, Marathon uses contracts as a motivator to keep you looping back into matchmaking. These missions, which are handed out by the aforementioned factions, push you to explore certain parts of a map or carry out specific actions, from hacking terminals to breaking windows.

Since you don’t need to successfully finish a match to tackle contracts, they serve as a good progression incentive (especially since they also net you loot). Plus, they tie nicely with your overall progress in the game — higher difficulty maps are level-gated, and some contracts will inevitably ask you to tackle tasks in them, going hand in hand in retaining your attention until you get there.

Almost every element of Marathon feels unified with a strong vision in mind — one that greatly benefits from a gorgeous and singular visual style that permeates its worldbuilding and basically every UI element on screen, creating an unmatched look. But is that enough? Games like Highguard and Concord, the latter being made by another studio under Sony, were short-lived experiences.

The likes of LawBreakers, Radical Heights, and Knockout City met similar fates within different timeframes. While Bungie has been in the live-service business for a while, it feels like every game of its nature is doomed from the start, regardless of how well it manages to perform.

Marathon is reminiscent of some of the toughest parts of Destiny 2, moments of overwhelming hostility where you feel endangered even while having optimal equipment for the task. The type of challenge that reminds you that you can never be too safe, and that danger is always looming above your head. But it’s those contesting moments, in Marathon and elsewhere, that reflect a tale of resilience. One can only hope that Bungie is given the grace of time to actually put up a fight.