I’ve been meaning to sit down and write this for at least a week or so now. The thing is, when I’m not at work or doing something else important like cooking or sleeping, I’m playing Marathon.
In an earlier post, I mentioned Arc Raiders as a game that I tried and kind of liked. I liked the environment; I liked the aesthetic; I liked the sounds. It just didn’t have the “juice”. Playing it didn’t get me excited or anything. A successful exfil didn’t make me look forward to jumping back in, and getting killed didn’t make me want to try harder next time.
But Marathon… I played during the Server Slam and it tickled all the right parts of my brain. The environments are cool. The aesthetic is incredibly stylish. Grabbing some loot just makes me want to go try to get more. Getting killed just makes me want to try again. (Ok, getting killed like five times in a row really blows, but I’m getting to where that doesn’t happen as much.)
The classes feel really different, but not wildly so. I started out playing Recon because I liked having a little spider drone that jumps on enemies, but that’s about it. You get informed when someone else pings you, but if you’re not good enough to do anything about that, well… Then I switched to Triage, and tossing healing drones at your teammates is great. You can help a squad a lot by just keeping everyone put together or getting them back in the fight. (Because it’s an extraction shooter, it’s not quite the same as, say, being a Medic in Battlefield, but there are similar vibes. There’s also a defibrillator that can EMP enemies!)
There aren’t a lot of maps right now, but the ones there are pretty varied. Perimeter feels like a typical sort of video game map. Some open spaces and buildings with some verticality to them. Dire Marsh has more wide open spaces. Outpost funnels everyone into close quarters. (I have no idea really about Cryo Archive; I didn’t run it last week – maybe this week.)
There’s a ranked mode, but… why? (I mean, I know why – because some people don’t just want to have the best loot; they want a little tag that says they’re the best so they can put “Top 5 Assassin” in the title of their Twitch stream or whatever.) You don’t need a rank to know when you’re doing well, though. If all your gear is blue and purple, you’re winning.
But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Since it is an extraction shooter, you can lose stuff. Losing stuff sucks. The game mitigates it somewhat by both letting you go on runs without stuff (either by using free kits or playing as Rook, which is kind of like a Scav run in Tarkov) and by giving you some more stuff when you level up, which you can do without successfully exfiltrating sometimes.
And some players will just cause you problems because they can. “There are only 3 minutes left; there’s no way a squad is still camping that room. They have to get out, too.” Haha, no, those assholes are ABSOLUTELY camping that room, just to be dicks. Possibly just to be dicks to YOU. (Probably not, but who knows?) “Oh, that squad is exfiltrating; they won’t mind if I slip in there and get out with them.” Oh, they mind, and they will gangbang you and strip you clean.
Sometimes, you can’t accomplish anything at all. You just fill into bad squad after bad squad that isn’t communicating, or is basically just doing solo runs in the trios queue. But when you get a good squad (either just randomly or that you found via another community)… man does it feel good. Completing your mission; completing someone else’s mission; finding a big stack of the salvage you’re looking for – it really squeezes some dopamine into you. (Out of you? I don’t know how it works.)
The guns are varied, but sometimes I look at my vault full of guns and the one I really want to use is one I don’t have at the moment. It works, though; there are weapons for long range and close quarters and in between, and mods that can tweak them more to your liking. It’s a Bungie game; at this point, you know going in it’s going to feel good to play. Halo was good. Destiny was good. (Still is, at least at its core mechanics, or so I’m told.)
It’ll give you wonderful highs, and punishing lows, but they’re both satisfying. A lot of the time, just matching into a squad is trash, though, and finding people to run with when you’re behind on missions or lower-level is hard. It has all the baggage of extraction shooters, although so far it doesn’t quite have the toxicity of Tarkov. (It also absolutely does NOT have the cooperative vibes of Arc Raiders. Sometimes you might be able to find a Rook that’ll cooperate with another Rook, or maybe a squad is happy to find an ally, but if you run up expecting to not have a fight, you’re gonna have a bad time.)
I’ve had some great runs. I’ve had some terrible runs. I’ve had some sessions where I can’t even put together a run. The game’s only been out for three weeks, and I’ve played it for 28 hours, and I can’t wait for a chance to play more.
I guess it’s fine.
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