Marathon Review Summary

Despite excellent gunplay, beautiful graphics, and engaging lore, the extremely low player population and terrible confusing UI lead to an overall negative experience.

Excellent gunplay and shooting feel: Multiple clusters praise the gunplay, weapons, and hit feedback, highlighting that Bungie's influence makes shooting feel precise, satisfying, and weighty.

Beautiful graphics and art style: The game is widely described as visually stunning, with unique art direction, biopunk/cyberpunk effects, and a striking aesthetic that sets it apart from other shooters.

Engaging lore and world-building: Players appreciate the interesting lore, backstory, and expansion of the original Marathon universe, including well-written codex entries and voice acting.

Smooth movement and parkour: Movement and parkour feel smooth and enjoyable, adding to the game's fluid gameplay.

Excellent sound design: Sound design, including music, voice acting, and world sounds, is consistently praised for its quality and immersion.

Extremely low player population: Player counts are critically low, often below 10k concurrent, resulting in extended matchmaking queues of 5-10 minutes. The population has dropped from peaks of 77-88k to just 3-7k, making it hard to find matches.

Terrible and confusing UI: The user interface is widely condemned as terrible, confusing, and cluttered, with poor color schemes and overly complex navigation. Items blend together due to small icons, hindering overall usability.

Poor character and weapon aesthetics: Character (frames), weapon designs, and overall art style are considered ugly, cheap, or unoriginal, with some citing blocky visuals that cause headaches. This negatively impacts the game's visual appeal.

Boring and uninspired gameplay: The gameplay is described as boring, uninspired, and tedious, with long missions that feel like a waste of time. Players find the overall experience unengaging and repetitive.

Unfair matchmaking for new players: Matchmaking often pairs new players with high-level veterans who have superior gear, and the game is generally user-unfriendly for beginners. This creates a steep difficulty curve and a hostile experience for newcomers.

Extraction Shooter Core Gameplay: The game is repeatedly identified as an extraction shooter with both PvP and PvE elements, drawing comparisons to Tarkov. It features a steep learning curve, weapon customization, and an inventory system similar to Tarkov, but lacks safe pockets or secure containers.

Punishing Solo Player Experience: Solo players face significant limitations, with a restricted single-player experience after the tutorial and a steep difficulty spike. There is no solo queue, leading to imbalanced squad matchups, and solo players struggle to recover lost gear, making progression punishing.

Bullet Sponge and Swarming Enemies: PvE enemies such as UESC bots are bullet sponges that deal high damage and swarm on noise. They require precision kills, leading to a steep difficulty spike after the beginner phase. Enemy design is considered generic, with similarities to other games like ARC Raiders.

Unclear PvE Mode Availability: There is a survival mode that is mostly pure PvE, and PvE is often described as the main focus of the game, with PvP being less frequent. However, the existence of a separate PvE mode is unclear, leading to confusion among players.

Seasonal Wipes and Repetitive Progression: The game features seasonal wipes with resets, requiring players to repeat contracts and loot routes each season. This cyclical progression may feel tedious, as players must rinse and repeat activities without permanent advancement.

Poor CPU optimization: The game is heavily CPU-bound, requiring high-end CPUs like the AMD 5600 to maintain 60 FPS even with low player counts. Updates have increased CPU usage, causing poor performance on older hardware.

AVX2 requirement excludes players: The game does not support CPUs without the AVX2 instruction set, locking out older hardware. This mirrors a similar issue in Hunt Showdown 1896 that alienated its community.

Excellent performance for some: A minority of players report smooth framerates and technically stable performance with no crashes or bugs.

High VRAM and RAM usage: On medium settings with DLSS Quality, the game uses 6.7GB VRAM and 11GB RAM while only achieving 39-45 FPS, indicating severe optimization problems.

Low FPS on high-end hardware: Even with an RTX 5070 at 1080p using Performance upscaling, average FPS is only around 140, suggesting poor optimization for modern GPUs.

Overall negative sentiment: The majority of reviews are negative, citing a combination of high price, poor new player experience, technical issues, and niche appeal, resulting in an overall negative assessment.

Game is not worth buying: Many players express strong negative sentiment, stating that the game is not worth the time or money, with numerous refund requests and warnings not to purchase.

Not worth the price: Reviewers agree that the game does not justify its current full price, recommending waiting for a significant sale (e.g., 50-75% off) or a free-to-play model before considering purchase.

Only for hardcore extraction shooter fans: Multiple reviews highlight that the game is designed for hardcore extraction shooter fans, especially those who enjoy punishing PvP and have time for a steep learning curve, while being unsuitable for casual or average players.

Technical issues and poor performance: Technical issues such as errors preventing play, server problems, and performance bugs are frequently mentioned as reasons for not recommending the game in its current state.

Community fair range: $25.00 - $39.99.

Game completion: 65.0h.

Session length: 4.0h.

Marathon delivers exceptional gunplay, lore, and progression, but initially suffers from a steep learning curve and poor onboarding. Most players report the game becomes highly addictive after the first 1-2 hours once the mechanics click.

Reported time to anchor: 2h.

Friction: steep learning curve; poor onboarding and tutorial; overwhelming depth of systems; punishing PvP and gear loss; hard to distinguish players from AI; confusing UI and menus.

Unlock drivers: comprehension of faction progression; understanding map flow and extraction routes; mastering gadget and gear usage; learning enemy AI patterns.

Extraction-Shooter Die-Hard: Aggressively pursues PvP fights, optimizes loot routes, and treats every raid as a high-stakes tactical engagement. Often plays in a coordinated trio and studies meta builds. Motivation: The thrill of high-risk, high-reward PvP combat and the deep, competitive extraction mechanics that reward skill and game knowledge. Stance: buy.

Solo Survivor Scavenger: Cautious and methodical; focuses on completing faction contracts and extracting with loot rather than seeking combat. Prioritizes stealth and survival, often playing the Rook class for zero-risk runs. Motivation: The satisfaction of successful solo extractions and the tension of navigating a hostile world without a squad. Stance: sale.

Bungie Aesthetic & Lore Enthusiast: Immerses in the world by reading lore entries, appreciating the cyberpunk art style and sound design, and enjoying PvE elements. May struggle with PvP intensity but values the atmosphere and gunfeel. Motivation: Exploring the deep lore, unique art direction, and Bungie's signature gunplay within a compelling sci-fi setting. Stance: sale.

Performance varies widely across hardware tiers: lower-end systems struggle with low FPS and crashes, while high-end rigs still face instability and frame drops, despite some users reporting smooth gameplay.

Windows 8-11GB VRAM: mixed. Reports are polarized: some users with 12GB VRAM report smooth performance after tweaks, while others experience severe frame drops (150 to 11 fps), crashes, and CPU bottleneck issues.

Windows 12-15GB VRAM / 16-31GB RAM: mixed. Many users with 16GB VRAM report stable 90-110 fps at 1440p with no stutters, but others describe crashes (BROCCOLI code), CPU-heavy performance, and frame drops to 60 fps even on high-end hardware.

Windows <8GB VRAM / 16-31GB RAM: negative. Users on 8GB VRAM report fluctuating FPS (40-60 on low settings) and crashes, though some find performance acceptable with drops to 80-90 fps; VRAM and CPU usage are common complaints.

Steam Deck: The game suffers from severe and pervasive technical barriers. The most critical issue is a deliberate, active lockout of Linux/Proton users despite anti-cheat compatibility, forcing Steam Deck owners to depend on an unsupported Windows partition. This is compounded by frequent in-game crashes, poor performance on high-end hardware, a cluttered UI that is nearly unreadable on small screens, and flawed controller support. While the core gameplay is praised, these issues make it effectively broken for the target Steam Deck/large Linux audience.

Linux and Proton: Overwhelming consensus confirms that Marathon on Linux is deliberately broken: Bungie uses BattlEye anti-cheat, which officially supports Proton/Linux, but the developer has chosen to disable Linux compatibility entirely. The game can launch but is connection-blocked, making it unplayable on Linux or Steam Deck without Windows. This is a conscious business decision, not a technical limitation.

Monetization: The game is a $40 paid extraction shooter with a live-service store that features predatory currency pricing (packs intentionally below skin cost), a battle pass widely dismissed as low-value and consumable-laden, and overpriced cosmetics. While there is no pay-to-win, the combination of a premium price tag with aggressive monetization tricks pushes it into the 'Aggressive' category (51-80).

External guides: Users predominantly express frustration that the game fails to provide adequate in-game explanations, forcing them to consult external wikis, walkthroughs, or guides for quests, item values, and complex mechanics. This creates a barrier to learning and enjoyment, especially for new players.