Marathon (2026) Review

Everything Bungie is good at is present. The shooting has the weight and readability that kept people inside Destiny's sandbox for a decade, the art direction is the sharpest in the genre, flat colour and hard geometry against a dead orange sky, and the maps are built so a fight can be heard coming and avoided. As an extraction shooter it is unusually generous: solo, duo and trio queues, contracts that give a raid a shape, and a loss condition that takes your gear rather than your progress.

What it asks in return is the problem. Seasons wipe every three months, so the armoury assembled over weeks is a rental, and for a lot of players that turned a great sandbox into a treadmill they stepped off. Critics were warm, scores in the low eighties with several nines, and the sales were not there, which Bungie acknowledged when a second season and a free trial failed to move the numbers. The design theft row that preceded launch was settled by crediting Fern Hook as a visual design consultant. A very good shooter inside a structure that keeps asking its players to start again.