Marathon

I wanted to like the game; a friend bought it for me so I gave it a good try for just under the two hour mark. I found the visual clutter to be entirely distracting to the point where I found it hard to figure out what I needed to keep and what I needed to pass on. In many games you can understand what you're looking at just by looking at it, here a lot of UI elements were just images that carried little value and understanding, leaving me to pick up the item to figure out if it was just loot or something I needed to equip. The different shell abilities were cool and I genuinely liked them, different playstyles and ways to change the battlefield. But therein was the issue for me; I once again had no idea what I was looking at, nor any understanding of what that meant. For example, the scout's ping ability: Another squad used it and I saw it, but I didn't know what it did until someone else explained it. Games live and die by player retention and the thought of struggling through 10-20 hours just to understand everything because of visual unclarity was something that I inevitably decided was not for me. Look, I don't mind hard games or PvP. I have thousands of hours in Tarkov and Grey Zone warfare. But in each one of those games, there is some small UI element that explains what you're looking at with a glance, or you can visually understand what you're looking at. Here that was not the case; one thing looked like a tupperware container, but that was a medkit. Another thing looked like a baggy and it healed some status ability, information I didn't get until I took the time to read the popup. One of these situations lead to me dying to another player because I was trying to figure out exactly what I was looking at. It's frustrating because I can tell that there is a good game under the surface, but the intentional digitalization and obfuscation of the meaning of what you're looking at really comes back to haunt this game. Some things I did like: Map seemed quite active, mech drops and crate deliveries made the map seem alive and that things were happening. Teamplay was encouraged through squad chat and prox chat separation. You can share rewards and quest progress with your party. Major complaints: Visual clarity was nearly entirely absent. Information overload through expecting new players to learn and know too much too quickly before being thrown into the deep end. Loading screen videos. Maybe some people like them, I found them unsettling and wished I could turn them off.