Marathon free download

From ARC Raiders to Escape From Duckov, extraction shooters are currently enjoying a renaissance, much to the delight of FPS fans like me. However, of all the new releases in this genre, none has caught my attention more than Marathon since I first played its early alpha version over a year ago. If you’ve been looking for a place to download Marathon for free, you’ve come to the right place! Below a short review of the game, you’ll find a link to download it.

1. Bungie’s style preserved
2. A few gameplay issues
3. PvP above all
4. Marathon is a world-class shooter
5. Sometimes you can get lost
6. Hero shooter
7. The story plays a bigger role than I expected
8. Great technical preparation from the start
9. Marathon system requirements

Even despite Bungie’s recent poor performance, the idea of combining deathmatch with an extraction shooter always seemed great to me. This amazing concept seems to work as well as I had hoped, with absolutely excellent gameplay, interesting characters and storyline, and such addictive loot collection. It’s hard to say if it will stand the test of time, but my time with the game has left me wanting more.

Bungie’s style preserved

I’ve always had a hard time describing what makes Bungie’s shooters so good, but whatever it is, Marathon has it. Maybe it’s the deliberate musicality of the weapons, like the sharp crack of a rifle shot, the metallic sound of the trigger, or those incredible, hollow-sounding thuds when you hit your target. Maybe it’s the rhythmic recoil, with pulse rifles kicking like a heartbeat and hand cannons bouncing theatrically. Maybe it’s the way the world reacts to your shots, with shields crackling and crumbling and enemy NPCs staggering in place as you fill them with holes.

Maybe it’s invisible features, like the near-perfect tuning of bullet magnetism and refined bullet velocity, which together make you feel a little better than you actually are. A former Bungie programmer once told me that the secret to making a great shooter is to create four seconds of gameplay that feel perfect, and then repeat those four seconds as many times as possible. I don’t know if that’s still the guiding philosophy of the current team, but in any case, they seem to have really managed to achieve it.

A few gameplay issues

Given the world-class gunplay I’ve come to expect from Bungie, it’s not surprising that some of the same flaws I associate with them have carried over into Marathon – and as usual, there are issues with geometry. From getting stuck on environmental elements that shouldn’t bother me to rather unreliable climbing, I find myself once again screaming during particularly tense moments when my character fails to climb a ledge for the third time in a row and my teammates suffer an ambush without me.

Overall, movement can sometimes be a bit frustrating, such as when you take serious damage from falling from a fairly moderate height and have to constantly watch the “heat” gauge (actually a stamina meter) to avoid overheating and becoming a sluggish blob for a while. In a way, these limitations are interesting obstacles to overcome, forcing the player to approach vertical environments (especially during combat) with extreme caution or to think about how much you run to prevent overheating and remain undetected by enemy troops. However, they can also be a bit annoying, especially when combined with awkward terrain that can make it difficult to collect loot and shoot smoothly.

PvP above all

As someone who loves PvP, one of the most refreshing aspects of Marathon is how much it deviates from the group hug energy of the PvE-friendly ARC Raiders community. Don’t get me wrong, cooperating with other players can be a lot of fun, but one of the main drawbacks is that you don’t get to see the thrill of PvP because it happens so rarely. In a game like Marathon, which fully showcases Bungie’s legendary FPS skills, I would be quite disappointed if PvP encounters were as rare as they are in ARC Raiders, because these shootouts are undoubtedly the best part of any match.

The pressure of two teams fighting in claustrophobic, dark corridors while trying to outsmart each other makes these some of the most tense encounters I’ve ever been a part of, and the reward of loot you get for winning these shootouts is worth the stress.

Marathon is a world-class shooter

A hallmark of a great extraction shooter is that “just one more round” feeling, and a big part of that comes from how fun the long-term loot-gathering gameplay is. This depends both on the incredible weapons and gadgets you can find, as well as the quest items you need to collect to unlock upgrades or complete a mission.

In the first few hours of gameplay, I was completely glued to the screen, browsing through extensive menus and trees to figure out which map I needed to play on to complete this task or get that item, and then going into combat with specific goals — only to have it all go to waste when I ran into a rival gang and the bullets started flying. I’m really impressed with how fast the game progresses, and even during failed attempts, I feel like I’ve made at least some progress, even though I lost valuable loot along the way.

Sometimes you can get lost

If there’s one thing that slows down this incredible progress, it’s the fact that getting started is quite difficult because not much is explained. I certainly benefited from having played many extraction shooters before, as well as from the intensive courses Bungie conducted during previous introductory sessions – but even so, there are still many moments where you just have to think about the more complex systems.

With a whole bunch of confusing mod slots to fill, upgrade menus that take a while to fully understand, and worst of all, very poorly explained mission objectives in the game world that are sometimes represented by a single floating icon, it takes a few hours of gameplay to master some fairly basic things.

This is by no means the same level of ambiguity as in Escape From Tarkov, and some of these difficulties seem to be simply part of the DNA of extraction shooters, but I can definitely see some people giving up on Marathon because of things like this, and that’s not cool.

Hero shooter

Marathon uses a hero shooter model, with different character classes that have built-in abilities that complement each other and appeal to different types of players, and this is an area where this shooter falls a bit short. Sure, you can become invisible or hide in a cloud of smoke as the agile Assassin, or heal and revive others as the support character Triage, but these archetypes are mostly generic characters we’ve seen many times before and are somewhat better represented in many other games.

Don’t get me wrong, they’re by no means bad, and I had a lot of fun trying each one out to see which one suited me best, but compared to even existing Bungie games like Destiny, where each class has an extremely unique identity and set of interesting abilities, Marathon feels a bit disappointing.

The story plays a bigger role than I expected

After each mission, I would meet a new faction, hear a few short lines of dialogue, or unlock new information to read, and I became genuinely interested in learning about this world and its inhabitants. I didn’t have enough time to delve into it, as it’s hard to find time to read when your crewmates are waiting to start the next match, but the atmosphere of these cutscenes and the eerie cyberpunk aesthetic are extremely interesting.

I want to learn more. I hope the pace of the story introduction remains just as fast and that it actually leads to some kind of plot twist, because Bungie isn’t always good at that.

Great technical preparation from the start

I should also mention how good Marathon looks and runs. I never encountered any connection issues, frame rate drops, or any other technical problems – which is quite impressive for a pre-release version of Server Slam.

Server Slam alone doesn’t give the full picture, but the journey to character rank 30 was a really promising taste of the first part of the game’s progression, which seems to be quite an intense climb to the end. Once Marathon is fully launched, I’ll dive into every aspect of the game and come back with a final review once I’ve seen what the second half of this adventure looks like – part of it is hidden behind planned updates that will arrive in a few weeks. But at least for now, I feel very good about the chances of this becoming my next obsession.

Click below to download Marathon for free!

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Download

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• Here is the link to purchase the game: Marathon

• Genre: FPS games

• Supported languages: ES/ENG/MULTi

Marathon system requirements

Minimum:

• OS: Windows 10 64-bit (latest Service Pack)

• Processor: Intel Core i5-6600 / AMD Ryzen 5 2600

• Memory: 8 GB RAM

• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (4 GB) / AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT (4 GB) / Intel Arc A580 (8 GB, with ReBAR on)

• DirectX: Version 12

Recommended:

• OS: Windows 10 64-bit (latest Service Pack)

• Processor: Intel Core i5-10400 / AMD Ryzen 5 3500

• Memory: 16 GB RAM

• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 (6 GB) / AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT (8 GB) / Intel Arc A770 (16 GB, with ReBAR on)

• DirectX: Version 12