Marathon

Game is dead - 5-10 minutes for a match up if playing randoms and you'll only get to play for 5 minutes before you run into purple shields with randos who willingly let you die. P.S. The PvE was a good idea but they didn't stick with it and to actually get into it was a chore of do many different things in PvPvE first. Enjoy your sinking ship, Bungie, because catered to the loudest and least numbered part of your potential player base. Don't buy. Definitely not recommended.

Some potentially hot takes before I actually review this: 1. As someone who used to love Destiny... the game was already dying. It's just coincidental timing, and anyone who says they CHOSE this over Destiny is operating with half a brain cell. 2. There is a learning curve. If you want a game where you can just turn your brain off, this isn't for you. 3. You can choose to have an open mindset and no attachment to your loot, or you can treat it like it's gold. Either way, you can't win every single engagement, and if you can't handle the thought of losing gear, competitive extraction games just aren't for you. It's not the game's fault you're bad. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That being said, Marathon is a great Bungie game. If you like Halo as a shooter, you'll have a blast here. Movement is smooth and varied across the different shells, and everything feels responsive—aside from some terrain/mantle issues that come with the Tiger engine. There is a learning curve at first, but once you get some runs in, you don't even have to overthink the different items, cores, and implants you find. You know what you're looking for: get in, get out. The maps feel great with various engagement ranges that allow for solid loadout variety, meaning there's no single mandatory meta you're forced to run. Visually, the maps are gorgeous, with tons of lore to discover as you play. At the end of the day, it is still an extraction shooter. Every time you load into a match, it's a gamble. You either lose everything and leave depressed, or you wipe a full purple/gold team with a free kit and ride the highest high. (Personally, I find it the most rewarding when I wipe a team with better gear than mine.) That high-stakes loop is one of the biggest charms of the game. Even without a dedicated PvE mode, there are plenty of ways to secure loot—albeit low-to-mid tier, given it requires little effort. Having played in multiple closed tests, I can comfortably say the game has made great progress. The fact that the devs continually push out test modes to gauge the viability of PvE or single-team infil shows they're genuinely dedicated to making a game people enjoy, even if it strays from the initial vision. (And yes, I know what we got at launch wasn't the original idea for Marathon either.) TL;DR: Currently, at its core, it's a PvP-focused game with its fair share of issues like anything else. However, it absolutely deserves a chance. It delivers well-made maps, satisfying gunplay, great movement, and solid loot variety. The ups and downs are huge, but it has tremendous potential for anyone wanting an extraction shooter that leans arcade-y rather than mil-sim like Tarkov.