Setting aside its visual style—which you’ll either love or hate—Bungie completes its Marathon after a long period of development. The end result is a solid title, though its formula is imperfect and it hasn’t yet managed to strike that subtle balance that allows for moments of pure brilliance to occur regularly. Marathon does offer a few memorable moments, but struggles to maintain a constant sense of tension or that sense of chaos inherent in unexpected encounters—the very essence extraction-shooters. So it’s by no means a bad apple, far from it, but the game will need some rebalancing, in both its PvP and PvE encounters. Aside from taming frustration, the addition of extra content to breathe life into such a promising universe really needs to happen fast. Bungie is, in any case, very attentive to feedback and is rolling out a series of announcements to retain and/or boost engagement: a two-player mode, an additional map, a ranked mode… Let's keep the pace with them.