PC · ~25 hours in · mostly solo/duo

Here's what sticks with me after six weeks of runs: I drop into Perimeter, two teammates already dead, third-party Runners closing from the upper catwalks. I slap a TNT pellet, rope-swing out a shattered window, and somehow extract with half my kit intact. Heart pounding, I queue again in under a minute. That loop? It's pure adrenaline.

That's the pitch. Bungie's extraction shooter is live, and the gunplay is the best reason to stick around.

The gunfeel is straight-up classic Bungie

Thirty seconds in and you feel it — that Destiny DNA in the recoil, the satisfying "thok" hitmarkers, the TTK that rewards aim without turning every fight into a coin flip. It's the strongest part of the game by a mile, and it's why people are still playing despite everything else. The seven Runner shells (Destroyer, Vandal, Recon, etc.) have diverged nicely post-patches. Some are meta slaves, sure, but you've got real choice now instead of the launch-week "pick these two or lose" meta.

The extraction loop hits hard… when it works

You load in with 1-3 players, PvE Unhoused shambling around, real squads hunting the same loot, and one extraction terminal you have to fight your way to. The tension when a teammate pings "third-party on the relay, banners through the glass" is chef's kiss. That's where Marathon earns its spot in the genre.

But solo queue? It's still a tax. Duos and trios sing. Solo feels like you're feeding pre-mades who've been on comms since the lobby. Bungie keeps promising better solo tools — we'll see.

The economy is brutal (in a good and bad way)

You risk everything you bring in. Die = lose the kit. Extract clean = keep it and grow your stash. That risk is what makes the wins feel god-tier. Post-launch patches added insurance tokens and tweaked bleed, which helped, but it's still a heavy time investment. Two hours a night and you feel behind. Five hours and you start questioning your life choices.

Where the seams show (and they show a lot)

  • Maps: Four in rotation six weeks after launch. They're good — vertical, dense, full of verticality and secrets — but four.
  • UI/Menu performance: Still janky post-match lobbies, confusing terminals, and too much clutter.
  • Monetization: Battle pass is whatever. The rotating premium cosmetic shop feels greedy already.
  • The whole "vibe" package: This is where a lot of us are tapping out. The runner shells are deliberately androgynous/genderless android bodies — fine on paper for the lore, but the cosmetics lean hard into the neon, stylized, non-binary-coded look. Every other unlock feels like it's trying to make a statement instead of just looking like a gritty runner.

Then you hit the loading screens: those "sense-memory" clips of moths devouring wet WEAVEworms (the in-lore bio-printers building your shell). It's straight body-horror maggot porn, and Bungie themselves said it's intentional symbolism for death/rebirth/transformation. Cool in theory, nauseating in practice when you're staring at it for 45 seconds every run.

And don't get me started on Oni. She's your "support" AI, the one giving contracts and guidance… except she also drops these deadpan "Affirmation Protocol" lines mid-run: "You are unique. You will be forgotten. Take relief in that." Or straight-up "life is meaningless, embrace the void" energy. She's framed as your ally, but she feels like the devs venting their lunch-break existential dread through a rogue-AI filter. Classic Marathon lore (rogue AIs were never the good guys), but updated for 2026 it just comes off bleak and try-hard.

The original 90s games had that dark, manipulative AI energy too, but this one layers it on with the modern Bungie aesthetic and it stops feeling like satire and starts feeling like the game is winking at you the whole time.

The verdict

Marathon has the best gunplay in any extraction shooter right now. The core loop is tense, the maps are strong, and it's only going to get better with the roadmap (new map and ranked already teased for the next couple patches).

But holy shit is the rest of the package divisive. The androgynous shell designs, the moth porn loading screens, the subtle "TRANS PORT" UI splits, and especially Oni's nihilistic therapy sessions make it feel less like a spiritual successor to the old Marathon and more like Bungie projecting their whole 2026 corporate mood board onto your screen.

If you can ignore (or mute) all that and just chase the gunfeel and extraction highs, it's genuinely excellent. If the aesthetic and tone are already grinding your gears like they did for me… it might be the game that makes you uninstall faster than any other this year.

Score: 71 / 100 — Incredible shooter wrapped in a package that's trying way too hard to be "deep" and "edgy." The guns save it; everything else is fighting me the whole way.