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I said I'd skip Marathon. I was wrong. [1]

['Grant St. Clair']

Date: 2026-03-23  

Yes, I know I boldly declared I was going to pass on Marathon — the new extraction shooter from Halo and Destiny developer Bungie — but I ask you to consider the power of peer pressure. All my friends were getting into it! I couldn't just not do the same when they asked me to!

Luckily, Marathon is more fun than jumping off a bridge, which I would not do if all my friends did. In extraction shooters, you drop into a map, grab loot, and try to escape before other players kill you and take your stuff. Marathon's pace is slower than the shooters I typically like, paradoxically tied to a blisteringly quick time-to-kill. Most matches consist of ten minutes of leisurely looting followed by a frenetic ten-second fight where your squad either wipes out another or doesn't.

It's a difficult hurdle at first, but the game's excellent art style (now minus the plagiarism) and finding a Shell — Marathon's term for selectable characters — I loved playing helped ease me in. I can't emphasize enough how enthralled I am with Marathon's aesthetic, from the big Y2K-futurism color blocks to the way the natural world creeps in around those bright, rigid edges. Even the UI, this chunky-but-slick Windows XP-meets-Ghost In The Shell thing, oozes style.

Everything down to the characters themselves looks mass-produced, but in a cool way, because they are, because you're going to be dying a lot. Still, it's a good pain.

A steady stream of future content is planned, apparently paid for by the $40 price of admission. The cash shop is so unobtrusive it can be ignored entirely and you get to play around on the ship from the first Marathon game.

If you like extraction shooters, it's worth a shot. If you don't, hey, same, but I'm still having a good time. Concord 2 this is not.

Previously:

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2026/03/23/i-said-id-skip-marathon-i-was-wrong.html

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