Marathon

Let's address the elephant in the room: when Bungie announced Marathon as a PvPvE extraction shooter, the internet collectively groaned so hard it registered on the Richter scale. The original Marathon was a groundbreaking FPS that made Halo possible, and here was Bungie turning it into... Tarkov with a synth-wave paint job set on a dead colony world in the year 2893. But here's the twist: it's actually good. Not 'good for what it could've been' good. Genuinely, surprisingly, infuriatingly good.

The core loop is addictive in a way that should probably be studied by behavioral psychologists. You deploy as a Runner. A human wrapped in a cybernetic body. Into Tau Ceti IV alongside up to six three-player squads, scavenge gear, fight AI and other players, and attempt to exfil before someone relieves you of your loot and your dignity. The movement system is where Marathon earns its name. It's fast, fluid, and rewards aggression in a genre that usually punishes it. Bungie's gunplay DNA is all over this, and every weapon feels like it was handcrafted by someone who actually plays shooters. Cross-play across all platforms means the player pool stays healthy, and the seasonal three-month wipe cycle keeps the meta fresh. If you can stomach losing your gear every quarter.

That said, the onboarding experience is about as welcoming as a bouncer at a club you can't afford. New players will get farmed for their first dozen hours, and the tutorial does roughly nothing to prepare you for the reality of extraction PvP. The server tick rate has also been... let's call it 'optimistic' during peak hours, leading to some truly creative interpretations of who shot whom first. And while the art direction slaps harder than any game in 2026, the story is delivered through collectible audio logs scattered across maps. Because apparently Bungie is physically incapable of putting a cutscene in a multiplayer game.