Kayfarer Marathon Review

Bungie's Marathon stands out as the most visually appealing extraction shooter or as a multiplayer shooter to be released in the past 5 years. While other companies seem to be making yet another Call of Duty, with drab browns and greys, Marathon is a unique blend of cyberpunk's bright corpo livery and realistic environments. The gunplay has the classic Bungie gun feel making all guns satisfying to shoot while also including their 'special sauce', the audio and visual feedback from hitting both AI and players with bullets. The extraction aspect of the shooter makes each engagement have a level of gear fear because each fight might be your last and if you lose, you lose everything you have. Coupled with a low time to kill and challenging UESC (bots), every run feels different and makes you want to have "just one more run" whether you win and extract or lose and have to go in to get more gear again. While the user interface could use with some changes here and there, like navigating to customization from achievements, the overall user experience is pretty good and matches their design philosophy. It is not too difficult to equip your gear from your vault and jump into a match, but if you want to customize your loadout or switch out mods it might take a bit longer. Also, the gear in the game is not very clear from the outset what is good or not good aside from the rarity, so a lot of time is spent reading the text explaining what each item does which is difficult or annoying in a match when looting. The UESC, the ai in each map is difficult enough not to be a pushover and force players to pay attention to sound cues when the AI spots a player, while also being 'AI' enough to skirt around if you intend on being stealthy and sneak up on a group of players attacking the UESC. All in all, the game is solid, good gunplay, fun engagements and interesting level design all encapsulated with Bungie's new art style and helps it stand apart from other extraction shooters.