Marathon’s gunplay hooked me instantly, but its confusing quests and UI might lose me later

Thrown Into The Deep End On Tau Ceti IV

My first full night with Marathon felt like being drop-kicked into a neon washing machine. Alarms screaming in my ears, glitchy faction leaders hijacking my AI companion mid-match, blue blood splattering across pristine sci‑fi corridors, and an interface that looked like an experimental art installation more than a videogame menu. It was loud, gorgeous, and completely overwhelming.

About 20 minutes into my very first run on Tao City4, I was crouched behind a crate, bleeding out, staring at three backpacks on the floor and the bio-synthetic corpses I’d just created to claim them. Two minutes earlier I’d been trying to help a solo stranger take down a UESC patrol. He missed a shot, panicked, and sprinted for cover. I didn’t. I put two bursts into his back, finished the NPCs, looted all three bodies, and extracted grinning like an idiot.

That’s when I realized what Marathon does frighteningly well: it turns you into a calculating vulture. I’ve been pretty chill in other extraction shooters like Arc Raiders or Hunt: Showdown, where cooperation kind of bubbles up naturally. Here? The combination of lethal gunplay, fast time-to-kill, and how precious every scrap of loot feels pushed me into full “trust no one” mode within an hour.

But the early hours are also where Marathon is at its weakest. The UX is a maze, the quest design leans way too hard on repetitive errands, and some of the map geometry feels like it exists just to get in the way of you having fun. The result is a game that feels incredible moment-to-moment, but starts piling friction on your shoulders as soon as you try to actually progress.

Gunplay That Feels Like Destiny’s Meaner Cousin

I played mostly on PS5 with some time on PC, and the first thing that clicked instantly was the shooting. Bungie hasn’t forgotten how to make guns feel disgusting in the best possible way. If you’ve touched Destiny 2, you know the studio’s talent for snappy aim, juicy sound design, and just the right amount of recoil and screen shake. Marathon basically rips that DNA out and cranks the stakes way up.

Every weapon I tried across my 30‑plus hours-burst rifles, burst pistols, DMRs, shotguns, and some truly vile SMGs-felt viable and distinct. I never picked up a gun and thought “this is trash” or “this is clearly a placeholder.” There are obvious strong options, sure, and shotguns indoors are predictably nightmarish, but I wasn’t getting deleted by some goofy, unbalanced laser meta. Most of my deaths felt earned: bad positioning, greedy looting, or getting lazy with audio and letting someone slip up behind me.

What I really appreciated is how the “hero shooter” elements-the Runners and their kits—don’t overpower the fundamentals. This isn’t a situation where abilities erase gun skill. Abilities are strong, but they’re closer to tactical tools than win buttons. A well‑timed deployable shield or movement dash can absolutely swing a fight, but if you potato your shots, you’re still dead. It’s a nice middle ground between Apex Legends and something harsher like Escape from Tarkov.

The time-to-kill is quicker than I expected. Unless someone’s stacked high-end shields, a clean opener and one or two accurate bursts are enough to evaporate them. It walks a thin line: any faster and it would slide into frustrating “who saw who first” territory. As it stands right now, it’s harsh but not senseless. I won fights I had no business winning by landing panicked headshots while limping between cover, and lost fights I should’ve owned because I ego‑peeked a lane twice in a row. That’s the kind of cruelty I actually enjoy in a competitive shooter.

PvE That Actually Matters (And Occasionally Clowns You)

Plenty of extraction games use AI enemies as target dummies or loot piñatas. Marathon goes further than that. The UESC forces scattered around the maps are not just filler; they will absolutely ruin a run if you disrespect them.

Grenadier types lob nasty, fast-detonating explosives that box you in or flush you out. Invisible “Ghost” enemies really live up to their name; they’ll appear out of nowhere if you get too comfortable, especially in the more claustrophobic interiors. Even basic rifle grunts, when they start pushing you in pairs from different angles, can become a genuine problem while you’re reloading or healing.

Visually, I still think the robots in something like Arc Raiders are more memorable, but Bungie makes these human-ish threats feel oppressive through numbers, positioning, and your own paranoia. They are spongier than I’d like at times, which is noticeable when you’re trying to be stealthy and end up dumping half a mag into a single target, but the danger they bring to PvP gunfights is worth the trade-off.

On top of them, the environment itself is out to get you: toxic plants, ravenous alien insects, lightning storms, and orbital drops that don’t care where you’re standing. My most embarrassing death so far? Limping toward a supply drop, zero heals left, chasing those sweet, sweet crates — only to be instantly downed by the burning thrusters of the ship as it took off. No enemy in sight, just my own greed and poor spatial awareness. Lesson learned… for about two runs.

All of this creates a constant, low-level anxiety that I really like. You’re never just fighting one thing. It’s players plus AI plus the map plus the timer plus your backpack full of stuff you absolutely do not want to lose.

Factions, Quests, And The Busywork Problem

The big drag on Marathon right now is how you actually progress your Runner and unlock cooler toys. That all runs through faction contracts: MIDA, Arachne, New Caloric, and the rest of the colorful weirdos orbiting Tao City4. Conceptually, I’m into it. You take jobs, you slowly pledge yourself to a particular flavor of corporate psychopath, and they pay you with gear, implants, and lore.

In practice, a lot of this boils down to: go to this point of interest, find this object or terminal, hold a button, do it again somewhere else, then make it out alive. The multi‑step contracts are especially bad for this. You’ll get a quest that wants you to hit two or three distant POIs in a single raid and extract afterward. That’s 20-25 minutes of sprinting between markers and waiting on uploads or scans… assuming you don’t get third‑partied or run into an unlucky PvE gauntlet.

When you finally die five minutes from extraction after ticking all the boxes? It’s demoralizing in a very different way from losing a fair fight. It doesn’t feel like high‑risk, high‑reward extraction tension; it feels like having your time wasted. The few standout quests—like contracts that force you to break windows in specific buildings, pull off finisher moves on other Runners, or interact with the map in more creative ways—just highlight how dull the staples are.

Which is painful, because the rewards themselves are great. The faction cutscenes and VO are some of the most stylish I’ve seen in a multiplayer shooter in years. Bungie leans hard into the retro-future corporate hell aesthetic, and every time a new leader hijacked my interface to yell at me, I was all in. The cast sells it completely. If those story beats weren’t so strong, I honestly don’t know if I’d have bothered grinding some of these contracts at all.

A Beautiful, Awkward UI That Fights You Constantly

Between matches, Marathon goes full sci‑fi art school. The menus look like the inside of a hostile operating system from some long‑dead AI civilization. It’s striking. It’s thematically perfect. And it’s often a nightmare to actually use.

Swapping gear from your vault into your active loadout feels clunky. Nothing is laid out how your muscle memory from other shooters expects it to be. Attaching mods to weapons involves bouncing between nested screens that don’t clearly communicate what’s equipped where. Failing a contract, then trying to remember which vendor offered it and where that’s hidden in the hub UI, is weirdly tedious.

Swapping gear from your vault into your active loadout feels clunky. Nothing is laid out how your muscle memory from other shooters expects it to be. Attaching mods to weapons involves bouncing between nested screens that don’t clearly communicate what’s equipped where. Failing a contract, then trying to remember which vendor offered it and where that’s hidden in the hub UI, is weirdly tedious.

The worst offender for me has been implants and cores. These are basically the stat and perk guts of your build, slotted into your Runner to change survivability, utility, movement, and more. On paper, that level of buildcraft is exactly what I want in an extraction shooter. In reality, the icon design is so samey and abstract that, for the first ten hours, I spent more time hovering over tooltips than actually theory-crafting.

Every implant tile looks like a slightly different geometric logo from the same tech company. At a glance, it’s almost impossible to tell a shield‑focused implant from a mobility one, or a healing enhancement from a detection buff. You can learn them eventually, but the learning curve is steeper than it needs to be simply because the UX prioritizes vibe over clarity.

This is where Bungie’s commitment to a bespoke visual identity becomes a double-edged sword. I love how Marathon looks. I just wish its menus cared a little less about looking like hacker propaganda posters and a little more about making sure I can equip a scope without opening three wrong submenus first.

Maps, Flow, And The Walls That Get In The Way

Marathon launches with three main raids maps, with the ominous endgame arena Cryo Archive locked behind a community progression goal. I’ve mostly lived on Perimeter and Dire Marsh, and my experience has been split right down the middle.

The actual hotspots—research facilities, cargo haulers, quarantine zones, cramped indoor labs—are fantastic. Bungie’s level designers know exactly how to build shootouts with multi-level sightlines, tight chokes, hidden flanking vents, and weird vertical routes that let you drop behind unsuspecting squads. I had a match where I spent ten minutes tailing a trio through a complex, learning their habits, then cut through a maintenance shaft to land behind them as they engaged UESC troops. Two died before they even turned around.

But the connective tissue between these points is where things get messy. Large outdoor stretches are chopped up by severe cliffs, opaque energy fields, and very deliberate “nope, you don’t go this way” walls. Of course maps need boundaries, but some of these feel aggressively artificial. You can see where you want to go—often a quest marker or extraction point—but the direct line is blocked by ugly geometry, forcing you into a long, awkward detour.

When you’re not on a contract, that’s just a mild annoyance. When you’re in the middle of one of those multi‑POI faction errands, racing the match timer, it starts to feel like the map is trolling you. Direct routes that would make sense die to invisible rules, and you end up zigzagging through hazard zones and enemy patrols just because the level layout insists on funneling you a certain way.

It’s not a dealbreaker, but I caught myself muttering at the screen more than once while getting hard‑stopped by a rock formation that looked climbable in every way except the one that counts. A little more subtlety in how the maps control flow would go a long way, especially if Bungie is planning more quest chains that demand lots of travel in a single run.

Progression, Shells, And Who Marathon Is Really For

The Shells—the different Runner archetypes—are one of the strongest parts of Marathon once you get past the onboarding haze. Each one leans into a particular fantasy: slippery flanker, tanky front‑liner, utility support, intel gatherer, and so on. Combined with weapons, ammo types, shields, and implants, there’s a lot of room to sculpt a playstyle that actually feels like yours.

The catch is that the game doesn’t do a great job of easing newer players into the layers. If you’re already comfortable with extraction games and you lived through Destiny’s “what does this mod even do?” years, you’ll adapt. If you’re coming in expecting something lightweight and casual because “hey, it’s Bungie, the Destiny folks,” the intensity and sheer density of systems will hit like a truck.

I enjoy that harshness. Losing a bag stuffed with loot still makes my stomach flip, but the immediate thought is “okay, what did I learn? what build do I try next?” That said, when you stack the punishing death economy on top of confusing UI and repetitive faction chores, the barrier to entry gets pretty high. Friends I queued with who normally thrive in shooters bounced off after a handful of runs, not because the gunfights weren’t fun, but because everything between them felt like work.

And looming over all of this is Cryo Archive, the locked endgame map that’s supposed to be the big test of the community’s endurance and Bungie’s long-term plan. Right now, at launch, it’s just a promise on the horizon: “keep playing, fill the meter, the real stuff is coming.” If that zone hits with Destiny‑tier mystery and encounter design, it could absolutely cement Marathon as a mainstay in my rotation. If it’s just a harder version of what we already have, the current UX and quest issues are going to matter even more for long-term retention.

Performance And Technical Notes

On PS5, the performance mode has been rock solid for me. Controls feel razor-sharp, and the haptics sell every shot and slide without going overboard. PC performance has been good on a mid‑range rig as well, with only a couple of minor stutters during extraction events or big PvE clusters. Nothing game-breaking so far.

Audio is mostly excellent in terms of weapon feedback and ambience, but directional cues are occasionally inconsistent. There were times I absolutely could not place footsteps that ended up being right above me, which in a game this punishing can turn into an instant “back to the title screen” moment. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, you feel it.

Bugs have been present but livable: weird ragdolls, the occasional contract progress not ticking until the match ends, UI elements overlapping. I haven’t hit anything catastrophic like gear deletion, and Bungie is already pushing out hotfixes, but for a live service that’s going to live or die on daily engagement, these rough edges need sanding fast.