Marathon

terrible game for one reason, all the menu crap you have to go through for collecting unlocks. make a collect all option so im not going through this terrible UI for 30 minutes

when SONY liquidates Bungie leadership and assumes direct control of the studio it will be richly deserved as this is nothing less than a comedy of errors culminating in a $500M game with 2k daily players

mid, not 40 dollars mid either.

Bungie is a legendary game studio - I remember a time when it felt like they could do no wrong. But lately it feels like the only thing for which they have a legendary aptitude is taking some of the most beloved IP in gaming and running it square into the ground. Necromancing [i]Marathon[/i], a foundational video-game sci-fi franchise, simply to let it walk around wearing the skin of the latest flavor-of-the-moment genre - the extraction shooter - is yet another misstep in their fall from grace. Credit where it's due, even despite that embarrassing art-plagiarism scandal, the art style is easily one of the game's biggest strengths. Unfortunately, it's most readily on display in the menus, as impressive high-res portraits/avatars of your AI handlers for whom you becoming nothing more than an errand boy. Just like [i]Tarkov[/i], [i]Arc Raiders[/i], etc., your interactions start and end with pointing and clicking your way around these menu tabs, taking direction on what pieces of functionally-identical refuse you'll need to collect your next time out. And if you thought you might interact with other players, you would be sorely mistaken. Unless you take refuge in the PvE mode they tacked on in a panic as player counts steadily dropped, every interaction with another human will take place at the end of the gun. The existence of a proximity chat function is genuinely laughable considering the temperament of the players who inhabit this game. Say what you will about [i]Arc Raiders[/i], it's certainly not plagued by the kind of joyless self-seriousness that characterizes [i]Marathon[/i]. Communication is so vestigial to this community that it stings even harder that this game went the allegedly-fashionable extraction route rather than committing to pure PvP. Even Bungie's historical strengths are muted or tainted here. The guns feel great, but the best ones are, in [i]Destiny[/i] fashion, simply analogs of classic [i]Halo[/i] weapons. The environments are often overlaid in a drab haze, flat and unremarkable until they erupt into gunfire that is some of the least-readable combat Bungie has ever designed. The mobility differences between shells is really enjoyment-killing. And whatever sauce the core gunplay might possess is hindered by the classic extraction-shooter foible of granular upgrade trees, your entire progression nothing more than pumping points into minute percentage increases. As reasons to soldier on go, it's deeply unmotivating - and that's the tale of [i]Marathon[/i] as a whole. As it turns out, pulling squares of different rarity tiers from filing cabinets and waiting to be shot in the back by mute PvPers playing with all the whimsy of insurance adjusters... just isn't a real recipe for success. Who knew?

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.

dead game

Yeah it is as bad as I thought it would be RIP Bungie Should stuck with Halo