Destiny Meets Apex Legends, But Worse

It’s been a bumpy road for Halo developers Bungie over the last few years. After releasing its last big game, Destiny 2, in 2017, the once-industry leading studio has mostly focused on frequent updates and upheavals surrounding the cooperative online shooter — which have fluctuated in quality between middling (2023’s Lightfall) and groundbreaking (2024’s The Final Shape). Despite having helped define the last 25 years of first-person shooters with the original Halo trilogy, Bungie has spent the last decade focusing exclusively on live-service games like Destiny.

And while the franchise helped usher in the current era of gaming where live-service models are intended to take over players’ lives for years on end (think: Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone), the landscape has become more tumultuous since Destiny arrived in 2014, as publishers race to get their piece of the now-saturated market. For every surprise hit like PlayStation’s Helldivers 2 (2024) that manages to break through the noise, there’s far more flops, with games like Anthem (2022) and Concord (2024) arriving dead on arrival and shuttering their servers shortly after launch. In a market where ongoing games are only as good as their last update, even successful titles like Diablo IV (2023) regularly take a beating as fan interest ebbs and flows seasonally.

With an unstable market dominated by a select few games, now might be the worst possible time to debut a new live-service shooter, but that’s exactly what Bungie hopes to do with this year’s Marathon (out Sept. 23). As the first new game produced by the studio since its acquisition by Sony Interactive Entertainment in 2022, Marathon has a lot riding on its success — even more so than most. Just two years after being folded into the PlayStation Studios portfolio, Bungie was hit was massive layoffs in August 2024 (losing 17 percent of its staff) while Sony themselves quietly killed multiple live-service games in the wake of Concord’s disastrous implosion — including one set in PlayStation’s flagship The Last of Us universe.

But everyone loves an underdog story. Could one of the industry’s most beloved studios defy the odds and make the next great online shooter? Based on early impressions from Marathon’s closed alpha test (running April 23 to May 2), the answer’s unclear — but potentially dire. Rolling Stone participated in the playtest; here are our biggest takeaways.

What is Marathon?

Although it’s new to many, Marathon is actually a revival of one of Bungie’s earliest series. Before Halo: Combat Evolved made Xbox a household name, the Marathon trilogy (released annually from 1994 to 1996) attempted to give Macintosh its own killer IP. Set on a futuristic sci-fi world, the games played similarly to Doom, serving as Apple’s answer to the first-person juggernaut that had taken PC by storm.

2025’s Marathon isn’t exactly a direct follow-up but is set in the same world as the originals. Players take on the role of Runners, survivors of a human colony tasked with scavenging resources from the planet Tau Ceti IV in the year 2893. Runners aren’t like the average person, having opted to sacrifice their mortal forms for cybernetically constructed bodies that can be reprinted to use over and over after every death.

The game is an extraction shooter — a genre where players are tasked with infiltrating a zone, scavenging resources and completing missions while surviving environmental threats and assaults by other Runners, before finding an exfiltration point to escape with their bounty. Unlike battle royale games like Fortnite and Warzone, or even hero shooters like Overwatch and Valorant, the extraction shooter is a somewhat less saturated genre (at least to mainstream audiences).

The reigning king of the genre is 2017’s Escape from Tarkov, a game with a dedicated hardcore audience, but the most popular extraction shooter the general public might’ve actually played is Helldivers 2, which exploded in users after arriving in early 2024. Both games are known for their extreme difficulty, highly dependent on squad cooperation and survival, making them far less accessible to casual players than something like Fortnite.

Marathon aims to bridge the accessibility gap, streamlining the gameplay to some core hero abilities for each distinct Runner and providing solid, yet familiar gunplay that Bungie has perfected while developing Halo and Destiny. Players are assigned to three-person squads and dropped in a zone of their choice from a growing list as they progress. The goal is simple: get in, fill your pockets, and get out in under 25 minutes.

Being simple doesn’t make it easy, however, as the world is filled with hazards. The most frequent opponents are CPU-controlled enemies that patrol outposts filled with loot. Breaching these areas and killing bots will trigger periodic airdrops of more AI enemies, in increasing frequency and threat levels. Environmental dangers are also prevalent, with certain chambers booby trapped to fill with toxic gas and acidic natural hazards waiting to chip away at precious health. You can also just fall to your death, a common occurrence for anyone who chooses a Runner without a dedicated double jump or dash ability to soften their descent.

The biggest threat players will face are other human-controlled Runners. Up to six squads can appear on the same map in groups of three (meaning 18 players total) — all with the same basic goal. While games like Warzone are PvP (player vs player) and Destiny are PvE (player vs environment), Marathon is technically PvPvE (player vs player vs environment), meaning that fire fights between users can turn into larger skirmishes against the CPU-controlled baddies and the hazards of the world to boot.

How does Marathon play?

The first thing Marathon asks players to do is choose a Runner, each with their own distinct abilities and gameplay styles. In the closed alpha test, four were made available: Locus, Glitch, Blackbird, and Void. Each Runner adheres to a basic archetype that should be familiar to anyone who’s played a class-based game before.

Locus is a soldier-type with a shoulder-mounted missile launcher, energy shield, and passive traits like a boost thruster and tactical sprint. Glitch is another more mobile rogue-type, with a double jump, slide, and a prime ability that amps up her dexterity. Blackbird and Void are stealthier types, with the former taking on recon duties to reveal enemy locations and the latter capable of turning invisible and shrouding the squad in smoke.

Two more Runners will be available at launch, but during the playtest, it was most common to see squads filled with dupes of Blackbird and Void. With their ability to both ping enemy squads and veil their allies, the reconnaissance Runners held much higher value in most maps than the ones predicated on moment-to-moment action. Partly because the goal is to avoid trouble when possible, and the inherent advantages of tricking other players for easy kills, it’s easy to see why they’d be favorites. The size of each map and the rhythm of each incursion means that there aren’t going to be that many shootouts, and the move sets of Locus and Glitch aren’t so overwhelmingly powerful that they outweigh the importance of stealth.

Bungie has confirmed that there will be two additional Runners at launch, and of course more to come post-release, but for now it’s just these stock characters.

After starting up a run on a chosen map, players must make their way around different facilities, raiding trunks, chests, and wall-mounted med bay packs for … mostly junk. There’s credits, grenades, shield and health kids to scavenge, on top of tons of materials whose inherent value isn’t really made clear at first — or ever, really. Although backpacks can be upgraded to house more loot, most of what’s found will quickly fill up your inventory after just a couple of minutes searching. Most of what’s found doesn’t really apply to the gameplay in real time — even the guns pilfered from enemy corpses end up being marginal upgrades best used as a swap once ammo is low.

The core gameplay loop boils down to creeping through buildings, killing CPU enemies, and hopefully avoiding getting shot in the back of the head by another team long enough to escape with the payload intact to add to your overall inventory for the next go around. On death, everything is lost — and death comes hard, fast, and frequent. It can be incredibly frustrating to trudge around a map in relative silence for 20 plus minutes lining your pockets, only to end up with nothing after catching a long-range bullet from someone else looking for some action.

Over time, the pattern becomes clearer as corporate contracts tied to specific loot types give some of the inventory purpose. Individual contracts can be selected prior to dropping into a match, and are the game’s primary form of long-term progression, allowing for permanent upgrades that make each run a little more meaningful. But for the first couple of hours, it’s hard to see the forest beyond the trees. What’s the point of nabbing all this stuff if it doesn’t have a direct payoff? What value do all these grenades and stimulants have if you’re barely going to be engaging in conflict?

When there is engagement, gunplay is tight. True to their roots with Halo and Destiny, Bungie knows how to make shooting feel good. But outside of clearing out platoons of robots with crunchy trigger pulls and well-timed headshots, there’s not enough moment-to-moment action to fill up each 25-minute mission. Players inevitably resort to racing around trying to find other squads to fight for a thrill, but even then, the Heat system limits how fast or long players can sprint, meaning it ends being a schlep to stumble on a potential encounter.

Does Marathon work?

Not really!

The game’s setup somewhat resembles Apex Legends, the 60-person battle royale that also sees three-man squads dropped into a sprawling map to fight for survival. But where Apex’s movement is fast-paced and its ever-dwindling map size forces players together over time to ratchet up tension, Marathon feels slow and mundane by comparison. Depending on the circumstances, it’s entirely possible to drop in, grab your payday, and dip out without ever even running into another squad — which frankly shouldn’t be possible.

A game of Apex always begins quietly, but it’s a given that the resource collection and strategic movement will ultimately end in a frenzy toward the end. Here, it’s plausible that the biggest risk factor will be getting left behind during exfiltration and having to wait a minute for the exit interval while hiding in hopes nobody comes to take your pocket junk.

There are moments when the game’s vision comes into play. Creeping through an eerily lit laboratory, rustling through lockers and chest only to pause at the rat-a-tat of machine gun fire in the distance — there’s a moodiness to the proceedings that superficially resembles the grim science fiction setting the developers want to create. But beyond those few and far between emergent moments, the game is genuinely boring.

Bungie has managed to master both the pulse-pounding thrill of PvP multiplayer with Halo and the loot-filled cooperative dungeon crawl with Destiny, and theoretically, Marathon should fall in a sweet spot just in between. And while its uniquely colorful visual design and world-building differentiate it from umpteen other shooters on the market, its world is hollow and devoid of life — and most tragically, excitement.

There will be some diehards who have managed to wring the juice out of Marathon after just over a week of playtesting, but they’ll be in the minority. As a live-service game, it’s obviously intended to start out with a foundation to build upon over time, but right now, just a few months shy of its release date, what’s on display feels undercooked. If it were free-to-play game, there might be enough to warrant an initial time investment without a sunken cost, but the game is planned to launch as a premium paid title, although likely less than a full-priced $60 or $70 game.

On paper, Marathon should have all the makings of a pretty slick multiplayer experience. In practice, it’s overplaying its hand. While a streamlined approach to the extraction shooter genre from the studio behind Halo and Destiny sounds like a recipe for casual and hardcore gamer gold, the execution leaves all the hype behind. An 18-person survival game set to a ticking clock shouldn’t be this sleepy.

Sure, the game is still technically a work-in-progress, but without a major delay to overhaul or add on new systems that makes faster, more meaningful, and most importantly, more fun, it feels like this could end up being just another flash in the pan games players will quickly forget.

Marathon is scheduled to release on Sept. 23 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows PC.