Marathon

TL;DR Marathon is a visually stunning sci-fi extraction shooter that leaves players with a frustrating desire for a greater experience the game was never equipped to deliver, resulting in an increasingly dwindling player count with an all too certain fate. This boomer shooter IP is over 30 years old; ditching any sort of campaign and putting PvE on the back burner from the onset was artistic and financial suicide. Inb4 "he's just an angry hater": I bought the deluxe edition, a couple premium skins, 100%ed the game and bought a copy for a friend. I've played Halo CE-4, including ODST and Reach, but Destiny was never able to get it's hooks in me. I want Bungie and Marathon to succeed, I just don't see it happening. Any hope to resurge the Marathon IP was dead at conception when they decided to turn a 30+ year old boomer shooter title into a niche, sweaty, small-market extraction shooter. Could you imagine how stupid it would have been for Bethesda and Id Software to release Doom 2016 as a battle royale to cater to gaming trends, in lieu of a genuine Doom installment? I don't understand how the Marathon team thought simultaneously alienating their few remaining fans while bottlenecking any new ones would ever work out as a successful business strategy. You'd think after Sony bought Bungie for $3.6 billion and poured an additional $300+ million into development, they'd make sure to have qualified staff that understand gaming culture and can read the market. The game is less than 6 months old and has a regular player count lower than For Honor, a game that never even tried to be good. That's about $4 billion down the drain and counting. It's really such a shame, too. This game had so much potential to have potential; full of could haves and should haves that ultimately didn't happen. The gunplay in this game is Bungie at its most refined; everything you loved about Halo and Destiny combat with none of the jank. I will say, I see a lot of reviews complaining about getting killed in 1 shot. Point blank headshots with a decked out Misriah and/or a charged sniper round against green shields will do that to you. Welcome to gaming, chuds. Get good. I love the map designs, the UI, the movement, the gunplay, the weapon designs, the shell abilities, the soundtrack is amazing, and the cinematics and overall aesthetic are deliciously cyberpunk. Thankfully cheating isn't an issue in this game but I reckon that's because the player count isn't high enough to justify the effort. That's where the compliments end, though, as Marathon does get boring fast. "From the studio that brought you Halo and Destiny" comes a vapid game with 5 maps and 1 game mode? Halo and Destiny were known for their long-winding narratives that took you across galaxies, introduced you to beautiful worlds, interesting characters, and fascinating aliens all wrapped in amazing lore with a variety of exciting game modes and dynamic combat that kept you coming back for more. The original Marathon was full of aliens, now all we fight are the same UESC robots across every single map. The Compiler "end game boss" doesn't feel very satisfying when, in the original Marathon, you face several of them in the very first level. What's the point of all the reboots and remakes if the end product is only ever a bastardized regression that fails to resemble its own title? We know there is so much lore going on in the background of this universe that we will never see, it's terrible they designed a game so beautiful with no intention of delivering a substantive experience of any kind. The factions, quests and contracts are repetitive and shallow. We only get glimpses of the lore through text/audio based codex entries with grainy images. Most codex entries reward skins and currency for completing contracts or achieving certain feats and milestones. The lore codex entries only unlock upon successful extraction of "collectible items" like drinkable cheeseburgers, corporate records, and other inconsequential doodads. These entries do not contain any important information that will deepen or reward your experience in any way. Why would I repeatedly risk inventory space to unlock information I could Google in 5 seconds? The biggest gripe I have with the game, though? I discovered that, upon completion of some codex entries, your reward is an invite to their online shop where there is a collection of real life merch that cannot be purchased without linking your account to verify you've unlocked the required codex entries. There's even a time limit on how long you have to unlock and purchase them. My reward for buying and playing your game is the "privilege" to spend another $25-35 on "exclusive" trinkets and tchotchkes like keychains, plushies, and t-shirts? Uninstalled. Bungie lost the IP that made them, cancelled the IP that saved them, then resurrected a 30+ year old IP seemingly designed to dig their own grave for them. None of us are happy to see it happen.