Game Review - Marathon

 

The visual design alone justifies the premium edition. I bought it. I'm not apologising.

Before the game released, there was a short film. Eight minutes, directed by Alberto Mielgo — the man behind The Witness episode of Love, Death & Robots and, before that, art direction on Into the Spider-Verse. He won an Oscar for The Windshield Wiper in 2021. Bungie handed him the keys to introduce this world and he made something that has no business existing as a promotional asset. The Runners move through Tau Ceti IV with a kind of desperate, animal weight. The colours are wrong in exactly the right way — too saturated, too close, chrome and rust bleeding into each other. People online accused it of being AI-generated because it looked too precise, too considered. Mielgo had to come out and clarify that 155 people made it over months. That's what genuine craft looks like now apparently. We've collectively forgotten what it feels like.

That short film sold me completely. Whatever the game turned out to be, I was already in.

What launched is an extraction FPS that I will happily stare at while being consistently destroyed by people who are better at this than I am. Ammunition displayed directly on the gun. Sections of the body lighting up and glowing as you move. The Shells — your synthetic mercenary bodies, disposable by design — are some of the best character work I've seen in a live service game in years. The world of Tau Ceti IV is built with an obsessive visual consistency that most studios can't be bothered to maintain past the concept art stage. Here it's all the way down.

The problem is that I'm getting old.

Not old enough to stop buying things I shouldn't. Old enough that an extraction FPS with a steep skill curve and the constant threat of losing your gear on death is starting to feel like work. The tension is real. The satisfaction when a run goes clean is real. But somewhere between spawning in and getting deleted by a squad I never even saw, my brain is asking whether this is still fun or just stubbornness wearing a very good-looking jacket.

If this were a third-person shooter — something closer to Arc Raiders in structure, where I could actually read the space around me — I'd probably never put it down. The world deserves to be seen. First-person buries it. You catch glimpses. Geometry, colour, light doing things that most games don't bother with. And then you're dead again.

I bought the deluxe edition for the Shell skins. Four bodies to wear while being outplayed. All of them look incredible. The short film is better than most things on Netflix this year. The game itself is probably great if you're the right kind of person.

I'm not sure I still am.