Name: Marathon Review So Far - Impressions After 25 Hours
Uploaded: 2026-03-07T21:46:34.000Z
Duration: 13 min 29 s
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Reviews director Tom Marks here with Travis Northup, our reviewer for Marathon.

Adverbs of degree

Travis has been our Bungee reviewer, for lack of a better way of putting it, for a very long time.

You reviewed a ton of the Destiny 2 expansions.

You also reviewed our graders most recently High Guard.

So you are a very experienced shooter player and now you are reviewing Marathon for us.

We don't have our final review of Marathon yet.

You've played what, over 20 hours already through the server slam.

You're going to keep playing, playing through the full build of the game and then we're going to have our final review of this in the future towards the end of March, I think middle end of March, because they've got some big endgame update things coming later.

But we wanted to tell you all what we think about it right now because you've already played dozens of hours and have a really good sense of what this game is already.

So Travis, tell us, what do you think of Marathon so far?

Yeah, Marathon is a very sweaty extraction shooter that has bungee gunplay in it.

And so kind of the idea of Marathon being like the marriage of this very hardcore game mode that is built around you acquiring and risking loot and getting into these really tense confrontations that determine who's going to walk away with all the good gear and who's going to end up back at their menu feeling very sad.

The idea of combining that gameplay model with the shooting chops of a studio who really knows what it's doing when it comes to first person shooters has always been a very cool idea.

And so the question was, you know, are they gonna be able to.

And for a while there was a lot of doubt about that.

Marathon has had a very rocky development period.

also in the middle of that it's been, you know, having stuff like Concord and High Guard and all these other sort of like service shooters rising and falling before it even arrives.

So it's coming out at a turbulent time at the same time.

And I have no idea if it's going to be successful in finding an audience.

There's plenty of games that I've liked and been like, hey, look, I could see this being huge knockout city.

And then, you know, those games just disappear suddenly after a very short period of time.

So I don't know if you're in the case of not to keep knocking on that one specifically.

We've got a ton of Runway, we've got this Year long update play.

We're really committed to supporting this.

The budget fell out from under them and now the game is shutting down on March 12th.

So that's an example of even when studios or games look like they have a long term plan, stuff happens.

And I don't think that's necessarily going to happen to Marathon, but

it's very hard to guess at something like that in the long term, the longevity of a game like that.

What I would say is some studios just know how to do live service games.

And the truth is 85%, 90% of live service games are not successful when they come out.

They're successful in six to 12 months after they come out.

And some studios have kind of the temperament for that Bungie, you know, they put Destiny 1 out there and it was not very successful until much later.

And lots of studios have done that and other ones don't have the tolerance for it and they just shut it down if it's not immediately the biggest game that's ever made.

And so what they've got right now, just based off of the server slam and I played Marathon in a couple contexts, I think.

I first played it in 2024 and then I played it again in 2025.

This is definitely the best version of it.

Like I could kind of see the glimmer of what this game could be in its earliest forms, but

there were just some of the polish and the kind of tuning that maybe wasn't exactly right.

And with the server slam, it feels like they really got there.

I mean it just, it just feel, feels really good.

The loop of like the pace at which you're getting new gear and unlocking new kind of lore pieces and completing quests and factions and all that stuff is really interesting.

And the thing I'm probably most surprised by is how much story is in this game.

But honestly, in the server slam I was like constantly getting new lore and every time they dropped something I was like, wait, that's weird.

And it kind of encourages you to, to do these quests because you just want to know what the heck.

There's a faction that controls all business.

Like what you know, you want to know about each of these groups.

And so that part has been pretty surprising and pleasantly surprising, which is good.

And the server slam, to clarify for somebody like me, I didn't jump into the server Slam.

How much new is there going to be when this game in the live environment?

I know they're holding that content, like I said, for a couple weeks out, but

like it's basically the full game, right?

They held back one character in total that's going to be there at launch, which is actually, it's this character as a matter of fact, this lady right here I'm trying to point out.

But it's one character and then it's one new map called Outpost that will be there at launch.

And then of course the end game content is coming at the, I think the second half of March and that will add a fourth map.

So we've seen about half of the maps that will be in the game within the first munch.

But on launch day we're really just missing one new region, one new character.

And then presumably there's some stuff they've kept from us in terms of how far you can progress with factions and quest lines and that sort of stuff.

And so I'm expecting that some of that will be different.

But like, if you wanted to know overall, what is the game going to feel like to play, what is the loop like going to feel like in terms of getting loot and completing quests?

So I feel like I've received probably 75% of the picture that I need to know what this game is about.

And the good news is that overwhelmingly that 75% so far is good.

And so the question will be, can they nail the end game?

Does it feel good after 100 hours versus just 20?

You know, there's like a bunch of questions that I have and ultimately Extraction shooters, of which I played many, they really do.

Their success depends on how well they are after your hundredth, 500th hour.

Like people play these games for a very long time and so that remains obviously not something you can just guess at, which is why this isn't a final review yet.

It sounds like you're enjoying it overall.

You want to play more of it, you're looking forward to playing more of it.

But what are some of the slip ups that you've seen?

So Bungie is like really famously bad at a couple things and they're still bad at them in Marathon.

I love you guys, but like it, you know, there's just some stuff you got to work on.

So if you log into Destiny today, the first thing you're going to say is, what the hell am I supposed to do?

They have some ways for you to find out, like, really basic things about how the game works, but

they're mostly, in my opinion, like tips on how to play an extraction shooter in case this is your first one.

Like, it's kind of like really basic stuff, but

in terms of like how their advanced systems work or what you're supposed to actually be doing out in missions, aside from just like finding loot and trying to protect yourself and all that, like, really vague iconography that you have to just like figure out as you go.

And so there's, you know, maybe some of that is intentional because they definitely don't want to hold your hand.