Developer Bungie’s new first-person shooter, Marathon, is a game where players drop onto an alien planet to fight a tyrannical intergalactic government’s robots, ambush fellow humans, and escape with sweet, sweet loot… or die trying.
Even if you’re unfamiliar with the wide world of extraction shooters — games where players need to get in and out of lucrative player-versus-player zones with entire inventories of loot at risk — that gameplay loop probably sounds familiar. Developer Embark Studios’ ARC Raiders, which took the gaming world by storm in October last year, also pits players against killer robots (and each other) as they try to grab any valuables that aren’t nailed down.
Frankly, I don’t think ARC Raiders and Marathon are all that similar, so it’s worth snuffing out the concern that there’s only room for one of the two in your game library. The broad strokes are the same — both games place players in the role of scavengers who will do whatever it takes to survive under positively catastrophic conditions. Both games feature lore-rich worlds colored by striking and distinct art directions. And in ARC Raiders and Marathon alike, death means losing all the weapons, medical supplies and tchotchkes you’re carrying. There are no do-overs.
In my eyes, though, that’s where the similarities between these recent releases end. ARC Raiders and Marathon are wholly separate beasts in their mechanics — even the difference in camera perspective makes a massive difference in how these games are played, with the former’s third-person angle helping players peek around corners while the latter’s first-person view increases immersion.
Moreover, live-service, multiplayer-only, player-versus-player games are shaped by their communities just as much as by their developers. ARC Raiders’ community largely fosters cautious collaboration throughout the game’s postapocalyptic Italian wasteland, while many Marathon players would stab each other in the back for a glimpse of bottom-tier loot in its neon-plastered alien landscapes.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t feel like ARC Raiders and Marathon are truly in competition with each other. The run-to-run gameplay, the combat speed and the «general vibe» of each experience are nothing alike. Which is a good thing.
Yet comparisons between these two games were inevitable: People have been champing at the bit to spin up narratives that pit these juggernauts against one another before Marathon even hit the shelves, and the headlines just keep coming. I understand the compulsion, too: A beleaguered Bungie just released its Hail Mary in the fairly niche extraction-shooter genre that is currently dominated by another game. It’s a baffling play from a studio that, from the outside, feels like it’s on the verge of becoming one of the next victims of the curse suffered by studios acquired by PlayStation.
Against all odds, though, Marathon turned out to be a pretty exceptional game. So let’s turn this perverse exercise on its head. While I think ARC Raiders and Marathon are both high-quality games, one of the two will certainly be better for you, specifically. I’m going to help you determine if you should be spending your time warring against the robotic menace (and occasional humans) here on Earth or far beyond the stars.
ARC Raiders is a game for social survivors
I knew ARC Raiders was going to be something special before it was released. Even in a sanitized games media environment without servers full of players, exploring the ruins of retrofuturist robot-infested Italian towns and countrysides immediately differentiated ARC Raiders from its competitors. Extraction shooters like Escape From Tarkov are mostly dark and dreary FPS games, and ARC Raiders feels like a breath of fresh air by contrast.
As a third-person shooter, ARC Raiders plays much slower than others in the genre. Players can peek around corners, identify threats and set traps — and they’re encouraged to do so, since the makeshift weapons that you carry around are huge, sometimes unwieldy to fire and always cumbersome to reload. The world is threatening if you’re not prepared, because it’s not easy to escape if you’ve been routed by a sneaky ARC bot or an opportunistic player.
What truly endears me to ARC Raiders is its community. The player base, at least in my experience, is mostly composed of friendly folks who just want to lend each other a hand as they scavenge the world above Speranza, but there’s still the underlying tension that chaos could break out at a moment’s notice. ARC Raiders is unique in the extraction shooter space as the one game where more people are willing to negotiate and work together than shoot you on sight, and that helps each run feel storied and distinct.
I’ve gotten to play as heroes, villains and every role in between. I’ve joined posses to hunt down antagonists sniping at a group of innocent looters, been handed loot by mysterious strangers, and backstabbed players who are celebrating a victory over a large ARC robot. I don’t feel like I’ve ever partaken in such a wealth of different interpersonal narratives in any other extraction shooter.
There are still issues with ARC Raiders that persist months after its release. While massive content packages have shipped new maps, enemies and loot, the game’s balancing still leaves something to be desired. I don’t like that the free loadout weapons are still among the best in the game (even after several rounds of game-changing updates) while more complex gadgets like ARC-seeking grenades have become even harder to craft.
ARC Raiders’ greatest flaw is that its endgame doesn’t always feel as compelling as the tooth-and-nail fight to get there. Hulking robotic enemies like the Matriarch are cinematic raid bosses, but after you take these titans down, the game starts to lose its purpose — the only things you score from this behemoth’s corpse are materials to craft guns that efficiently destroy more ARC. But you’ve already summited that mountain by beating the game’s hardest challenge, so what’s the point? If you aren’t choosing to wipe your character progress every season, ARC Raiders grows stale — while Marathon has a promising future if Bungie integrates Destiny-like raid mechanics into its endgame.
Marathon is a free-for-all sci-fi sweatfest
You have to be a little bit of a freak to enjoy Bungie’s latest first-person shooter. The tagline for the game is «death is the first step,» so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the surface of Tau Ceti IV (the distant planet where Marathon takes place) is rife with dangerous flora, fauna and killer robots that are absolutely brutal to take on.
Even if you master this strange new world, other players will happily stab you in the back. Popping your head around a corner and trying to make conversation with another player might be a good way to make friends in ARC Raiders, but trying the same thing in Marathon will often get your head popped.
If anything, Marathon nurtures the «every man for himself» mentality, since it’s exceptionally easy to take down other players. While ARC Raiders favors slow, drawn-out engagements with makeshift weapons and shrapnel grenades where methodical approaches can decide firefights, Marathon has a very fast «time-to-kill,» making it easy for players to knock each other out in seconds. If you’re not shooting first and asking questions later, you’re losing a precious advantage you have over an opponent.
Each moment is fraught with danger, and Marathon’s world feels truly oppressive in a way that ARC Raiders doesn’t. The sound design is fantastic — the ambience of the otherworldly environment and dead industrial outposts contrasts with the thudding footfalls of nearby enemies to great effect, fueling my fear and spiking my adrenaline as I prepare to fight until my last breath. ARC Raiders only produces this thrill level in the endgame during raids against gargantuan robots; in Marathon, that satisfying mix of cortisol and dopamine is being drip-fed to you every single match.
Marathon regularly borrows elements from other extraction shooters, at the risk of sometimes feeling like a game I’ve played before. But Bungie’s latest game takes these building blocks — the unforgivingly quick time-to-kill in PvP gunfights, an in-depth contract and faction reputation system and a wonderfully complex set of perk trees — and polishes them to fit Marathon’s cold, corporate, cyberpunky world.
More impressively, the small twists on the familiar extraction shooter formula (especially light hero-shooter elements of the classes) feel extremely impactful, completely changing the way I create loadouts and instigate fights during my runs. Marathon feels like an «all killer, no filler» version of what most of the genre’s games are trying to do — it’s not groundbreaking, but it might be the best «classic» extraction shooter on the market right now.
Which extraction shooter is worth your time?
Despite my effusive praise, you may be surprised to read that I actually don’t much enjoy Marathon. I appreciate that the genre’s core gameplay loop is enhanced by Bungie’s trademark satisfying gunplay, as well as a ton of meta-progression bonuses, which I’m a total sucker for. And while I’m sure the corporate neon-drenched brutalism of Marathon’s graphic realism art style is revolting to some folks, I think the game is gorgeous.
Still, there’s just something about playing Marathon that feels empty to me compared to ARC Raiders. Every human interaction in ARC Raiders is a real toss-up between friendship and firefight. During some runs, I’ll make allies and share loot, and in other matches, I’ll strike up an uneasy alliance with a shifty player to extract together. Getting double-crossed is part of the game, but it isn’t guaranteed. I’ve fallen in love with ARC Raiders because of its community.
ARC Raiders clicks for me where Marathon just doesn’t, and that’s OK. Just because these games are big-budget productions that are ostensibly positioned as competitors doesn’t mean they’re actually built for the same audience. Bungie and Embark Studios both made exceptional extraction shooters.
If you enjoy emergent narratives and novel interactions with strangers (or you can’t keep up with twitchy, fast-paced shooters), ARC Raiders will be your go-to game. If you enjoy moving fast (and dying faster), have an affinity for Bungie’s signature brand of gunplay, or you feel at home playing Destiny or Apex Legends, then Marathon will be your new favorite game.
I truly believe neither of these games is better than the other — they’re just different, and it’s up to you to recognize what experiences you generally enjoy and choose accordingly. And hey, at the end of the day, it’s always worth remembering that nobody will stop you from enjoying them both.
