Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Windows
Developer: Bungie
Publisher: Bungie
Throughout its twists of fate, Bungie’s 2026 Marathon has been a story of repeatedly confronting death, both in and out of the game.
Since its development began in 2019, the new iteration of Bungie’s revived IP has had its share of brushes with fatality. Over the years, the project has experienced a change in ownership to Sony, the sudden shift of its creative director, pivots in its genre vision, company-wide layoffs, delays, and even an art plagiarism scandal.
Upon its first tease in 2023, its reveal as a PvPvE extraction shooter was controversial among much of its fanbase from the 90s, who originally fell in love with the IP due to its signature lore and single-player storytelling.
However, the Marathon team continually pushed through, reinventing and adapting until the game’s release in March 2026.
In a world where the once-niche Extraction genre has breached the mainstream due to the rise of ARC Raiders, Marathon has chosen to turn its back on riding that casual wave and has instead embraced a hardcore and unforgiving PvP-focused experience.
Its launch trailer, “In Death We’ve Just Begun,” makes this design philosophy painfully clear as a trio of Runners repeatedly fail and die in their runs. Desperation, frustration, and tension all perfectly mirror the game's expected emotions that fit into a typical twenty-minute run.
With the game yet to exceed 90,000 concurrent players on Steam, it’s clear that this punishing loop isn’t for everyone. However, beneath its brutal nature lies a truly unique gem of a game. For those who it does click with, it is an addictive, high-stakes journey that only gets better as you play it and learn from every run.
So while Marathon will likely never hit the peaks of its more accessible competition, it has earned itself a fiercely loyal ride-or-die community. As of writing this review, we can confidently say we’ll be along for that ride.
Our review for Marathon was conducted with the PC version on Steam.
The Highs
Top-notch Game Feel
Let’s get it out of the way. If you were wondering whether Marathon still had Bungie’s signature polish and feel, it absolutely delivers on that legacy.
While every weapon naturally varies in its meta viability, each has a unique feel that truly changes the way you play to get the most from it.
From the firing and reload animations to projectile flight and impact, Bungie proves they’re still among the best in the biz when it comes to gunplay, making every firefight incredibly immersive.
This standard is extended to the classes, known as Runner Shells. While the design of their kits is comparable to the abilities in Apex Legends in form and function, Marathon takes it a layer deeper by giving each Runner Shell differences in base stats like Agility and Heat Capacity (the game’s stamina system).
Whether you’re sprinting and sliding between cover as the chaotic Vandal or whipping around the map as the opportunistic Thief, each provides a distinct gameplay loop that makes learning how to play each one satisfying, with plenty of room for skill expression and mastery.
Speaking of maps, Marathon makes a case for having the best within the Extraction genre. Each zone strikes a well-crafted balance between worldbuilding, compelling events, and emergent player interactions. Outpost and Cryo Archive, in particular, are standouts that raise the bar in ways that text description just won’t do justice.
Lastly, all of these aspects are tied together by Marathon’s sound design and art direction. While it might not be for everyone, it’s undeniable that it’s a package that’s hard to find another game to compare to. From the moment you log in, every audio cue and visual component is otherworldly and alien, to really simulate you sending your consciousness to Tau Ceti IV.
Well-Designed Faction System
In extraction shooters, what happens outside of runs is typically just as important (and sometimes even more so) than what happens during them.
Players have to manage their loadouts, restock supplies, and ultimately plan how much they want to risk on their next run.
Marathon’s take on this part of the extraction gameplay loop revolves around its faction system, which is comprised of six corporations: CyberAcme, NuCaloric, Traxus, MIDA, Arachne, and Sekiguchi.
From a lore perspective, they operate much like the megacorps of Cyberpunk 2077, essentially pulling the strings of the world from a macro level and vying for power from different angles.
As you complete contract quests and build up reputation with each one, you unlock impactful perks that essentially act as your Skill Tree, lasting until the seasonal reset.
Functionally, a good comparison is to the manufacturers of Borderlands, as each one has a theme and specializations related to playstyle preferences.
For example, NuCaloric is an agricultural giant that focuses on consumer goods like the infamous Liquid Cheeseburger. Their contracts often include harvesting organic materials, looting medical supplies, and analyzing samples of flora and fauna.
By working for them, you can unlock perks related to survivability, such as access to shields, heals, and self-revives from the Armory.
On the other side of the spectrum is MIDA, a revolutionary “movement” that wants to disrupt the status quo. You build up a reputation for them by doing quests that involve hacking, sabotage, and planting explosives, which in turn grants you access to Claymores and a variety of Grenades.
Overall, this system gives players the opportunity to gradually specialize in the exact playstyle they want while also getting regular doses of story drops between major missions.
Compared to the vendors, benches, and meager skill tree of ARCRaiders, Marathon’s faction system is in a different weight class of vision and execution.
The Rook Provides Brilliant Asymmetry
While every Runner Shell in Marathon provides a distinct experience, the Rook is essentially playing an entirely different game.
When you queue as a Rook, you are forced to deploy solo into a lobby of squads that is already in progress — it isn’t uncommon for Rooks to end up in a match that’s already under ten minutes to go.
Furthermore, the Rook also cannot assemble a specific loadout from their Armory stash, as they must use a free loadout. Considering these factors, why would anyone play it?
Simply put, the Rook offers a low-risk, high-reward way to farm up resources and learn the ins and outs of a map at your own pace. If you get caught out and die, oh well, you didn’t lose anything.
But, there might also be runs where you end up with an epic haul, whether by pulling off a John Wick-style squad wipe or simply scavenging the aftermath of battles that were too chaotic for the original participants to loot from.
While you don’t have any combat-centric abilities, you do have two vital tools: a mask that allows you to blend in with UESC PvP bots (you won’t be detected as hostile by them) and the ability to regenerate your health.
An obvious parallel is the scav from Escape From Tarkov (although scavs do have the ability to queue with each other). While instances of cooperation are generally rare due to Marathon’s kill-on-sight nature, Rooks have been known to band together in numbers as large as five to six to become a force to be reckoned with.
From personal experience, there’s nothing quite like sitting in Outpost’s Pinwheel Base as a trio and listening to a growing horde of Rooks plotting on how to trap and kill your squad.
This unknown Rook element means you can never let your guard down, as there’s no way of knowing how many are still lurking about the map.
The real kicker is that the Rook class scales with Faction progression, unlocking powerful upgrades like starting with a shotgun, Claymores, and so on. This means that as a season reaches its later stages and approaches its reset, the Rooks you run into will be serious threats.
Overall, it’s a great implementation of dynamic asymmetry that can yield some of the game’s most memorable moments.
The Lows
High Barrier to Entry
Overall, we highly respect Bungie’s dedication to a hardcore, unforgiving vision, as it’s a subjective preference that will be a high for some and a low for others.
By no means will we dock them points for design choices like not having behavior-based matchmaking, Safe Pockets, or low time-to-kill. However, there are a few cases of unnecessary friction.
To start, the UI can often lean toward style over substance. While it does look amazing from an aesthetic point of view, there are times when things just don’t make sense.
For example, navigating from the starting menu screen to a faction’s skill tree takes several clicks to reach, despite being one of the most often visited areas. Another example is the item iconography, where items like Implants, which grant bonuses and different effects to your builds, all use the same image.
You do get used to navigating and reading all these, but it does take time away from the better parts of the game without adding any value or immersion.
The second notable barrier on our list is the lack of a Shooting Range. This is a standard across extraction shooters, with Escape From Tarkov, ARC Raiders, and Hunt: Showdown 1896 all having one. In Marathon, players have to risk revealing their positions to UESC bots and other Runners in order to try out guns and learn the nuances of their abilities.
In this specific case, we do think lowering the floor a little bit with the addition of a Range wouldn’t harm the game’s overall high ceiling vision. If anything, it makes the player base more knowledgeable without having to potentially sacrifice a run or loot for science.
Third, we want to acknowledge that the game is clearly designed with premade trios in mind.
While you can auto-fill as a solo into a squad, it can be an inconsistent experience as you can often end up with teams that have unrelated quests or discrepancies in the amount of credits invested into their loadout. Players who do want to play purely solo are also left out of the Ranked system and can’t queue into the Cryo Archive map at all (although the latter might not be possible with how curated an experience Cryo is).
Lastly, we were surprised that duo queue wasn’t part of Marathon’s launch, especially after it was delayed and seeing how well-received it was as a quickly added feature for ARC Raiders during that delay. Bungie has since added an experimental duo queue for Perimeter, the first map, but it felt like they failed to read the room a bit (or simply didn’t have the time or resources).
Optimization Needs Work
For a high-stakes game that demands precise execution and should benefit from its 60Hz tick rate, Marathon unfortunately has a lot of room to grow in the optimization department.
Throughout its Server Slam weekend, Bungie acknowledged reports of “high CPU use, low GPU utilization, FPS ceilings ~80–100, and some stuttering.” Unfortunately, these problems are still present after launch for PCs of specs across the board, including top-end rigs.
There has been much speculation that these technical bottlenecks may be symptoms of Marathon using Bungie’s Tiger Engine, which also powered Destiny 1 and 2 and had all too familiar pains.
While most of our playtime has been decent enough on the performance front, we’ve had to try out quite a few PC optimization guides. Even then, we have experienced notable drops in stability at least a few times per session, which adds a frustrating variable that can cost you a run.
Buildcrafting Could Be Cooler
In the dev blogs and ViDocs leading up to Marathon’s release, the buildcrafting aspect was emphasized for its potential in letting you customize and augment your playstyle.
Alongside the weapons, shield, and equipment you take, these builds center around the Cores and Implants for your Runner. Cores offer a way to modify or buff your abilities, while Implants have three slots that typically improve your base stats or give small perks like pinging the location of an enemy who just damaged you with a grenade.
Overall, these building options are undeniably impactful and important for strengthening your capabilities — you can really feel the difference when you’re kitted out.
However, we felt that Bungie played it a bit safe with these, as a lot of the upgrades and choices you make don’t really change the way you play. Oftentimes, they simply let you do a better job of what you would’ve been doing with your Runner regardless.
For example, the Destroyer, who is the closest thing to a tank in Marathon, has an activatable energy barricade that shields damage akin to Overwatch’s Reinhardt or Brigitte.
They have a gold Core (the highest rarity color) called Counter Attack, which periodically fires a retaliatory missile back at your attacker when you block damage with it equipped. This is obviously a huge upgrade that can change the tide of a battle, but it doesn’t really change your overall playstyle.
We’d love to see more creative swings in the future, such as Triage’s Med Bots having a Core that allowed them to be used offensively. Or, perhaps Recon could choose to spec its Tracker Drone into a defensive ability that could run to and shield an ally in a clutch moment.
Of course, this is a nuanced space where balance is always a question, but the point is that it feels like there is a bit more design space than what’s currently been expressed, especially by the high rarity options.
Our Score
8.5/10 (A great game that deserves a bigger audience)
Despite its tumultuous development history and the shortcomings of its launch state, Marathon is a great game and a worthy addition to the extraction ecosystem.
While much of the industry has sought ways to widen the door for a casual audience, Bungie has chosen to deliver an uncompromising but deeply rewarding hardcore experience.
If you’re willing to swallow the pill of getting your ass handed to you, especially early on, we promise that it only gets better the more you play and progress.
We acknowledge that it remains to be seen whether Sony will allow Marathon to maintain its current course and identity due to profit expectations. But at the end of the day, we respect Bungie for sticking to their guns and making a bet on a game that isn’t designed to serve everyone.
Give it a shot if you’re looking for a hardcore extraction shooter that leans away from the military realism of Tarkov in favor of futuristic gadgetry and mechanical execution, or if you’re an ARC Raiders fan whose interest has plateaued due to its lack of endgame depth.
If you’re looking for a game where you can immediately jump in after a long workday and turn off your brain with guaranteed fun in mind, this might not be for you.
Main Reviewer: Agilio Macabasco (originally published March 22, 2026)
