I love this game so much, can't wait for season 2
I love this game with all my heart. If you can free your mind from gear fear and accept that death is the next step, you will have a great time. The onboarding is a bit rough. I died during the tutorial. However, if you get through the first 5/10 hours you will start to 'get' it, and from then on you are hooked. I would recommend playing with headphones, and preferably a mic. You can play this game very well with a casual time investment, playing the game is however not very casual, it is quite tense (which i enjoy).
Great things about Marathon:
Gameplay: PEAK. It's really fun, and it's fun on every loot level. Enemy AI is very smart and challenging, PVP is crazy, very tense but a lot of fun. Solo pvp is very much a game of stealth and outmanoeuvring one another, when playing trio's you can have minute long gun battles, where you rez ur teammates and they rez u. It is a bit sweaty, but in my opinion the raw skill in aiming and reaction time is less important in this game then in other FPS games. Decision making is really key to winning here, and that makes losing (you will lose ALOT) less frustrating (to me at least). 90% of my losses I can think if at least two ways how i could have turned the battle around.
Story: Very much a 90ies or early zeroes Sci-Fi vibe with cybernetic consciousness, DNA, AI, hypercorporations and space anarchists. Feels true to the vibe of the OG Marathon games. Story and lore is mainly audio logs and terminal text in the Codex with some events happening in game. There are 4 different main story lines each exploring one thread of the mystery of Tau Ceti IV, and then you will also unlock parts of lore by extracting valuable items such as Drinkable Cheese-Burgers and Pagan stick figures. These bits of lore can be an encouraging audio message to the prospective colonists from the CEO of bigbadcorporation nr 1, or a very chilling diary entry from a colonist. Environmental storytelling is also very good!
Maps:
There are only 4 maps of which 1 (Cryo Archive, endgame map) is only open on weekends. Does not sound like much BUT these maps are very well designed and intricate. After 100 hours i am still learning new routes and ways to move around the map. The weather conditions also affect how the map plays, and different events happen each time, so it does not get boring in my opinion. The Endgame map is very cool and i'm only just starting to learn how it works.
Gameplay: PEAK. It's really fun, and it's fun on every loot level. Enemy AI is very smart and challenging, PVP is crazy, very tense but a lot of fun. Solo pvp is very much a game of stealth and outmanoeuvring one another, when playing trio's you can have minute long gun battles, where you rez ur teammates and they rez u. It is a bit sweaty, but in my opinion the raw skill in aiming and reaction time is less important in this game then in other FPS games. Decision making is really key to winning here, and that makes losing (you will lose ALOT) less frustrating (to me at least). 90% of my losses I can think if at least two ways how i could have turned the battle around.
Gunplay: It feels great, each gun is memorable and almost every gun is useful! Gun upgrades are very meaningful but don't change the base damage so you can still win using a unmodified gun. Some guns are rarer then others, but in every class of guns the 'best' one is always a gun that you can find or obtain very or fairly easy.
Progression:
Works very well, there are multiple ways to progress, you can get better loot, complete faction contract, level up your factions, buy upgrades to your base stats etc. I have never run out of gear since you get a lot of it for free by levelling up factions, contracts and the daily free items. And then there is the ROOK character, basically a scavenger which is great way to get some good goop without putting anything on the line.
Dev response the season has been amazing! I highly recommend this game to anyone who loves FPS!