My early days with Marathon have reminded me of how I fell in love with Apex Legends. Respawn's battle royale famously dropped out of nowhere in early 2019 and I was instantly in awe of its maps, its guns and, above all, its heroes and their unique abilities. Marathon is an entirely different genre but its own hero classes, called "shells", elicit that same wonder.
They feel fresh and flexible, deep and customizable, and as I play I'm constantly discovering new wrinkles in their skills. I know it's early days but these shells feel like they set Marathon apart from Arc Raiders and other extraction shooters: you get the underlying tension, joy and despair of the genre with a pungent hero shooter smeared on top.
The Thief shell is perhaps the most brilliantly bizarre.
Her grappling hook – which flings you onto high ground or catapults you behind enemies – is the most boring part of her kit, which tells you a lot about how electric she feels. Her other two abilities are instantly among my all-time favorites in a multiplayer shooter, for very different reasons.
One is an x-ray scanner that reveals nearby lootables and, crucially, highlights them with the colour of their rarest item – white for common, blue for rare, and so on. It's surely inspired by Loba, a character in Apex Legends, who can spy high-tier loot through walls. In an extraction shooter, where gear is king, this simple trick transforms how you explore: I can ignore all the white crates and head straight for the blue and purple, removing the tedium of opening boxes for scraps.
The Thief's other skill, her showpiece, is a drone that can literally pickpocket enemies. If you fly close enough to whip opponents with the drone's extendable tether they'll drop their most valuable piece of gear – and with every additional whack, you'll poke another hole in their backpack. They may not even notice that they're leaking goodies like a sieve.
It feels like a troll skill, but I can't put into words how satisfying it feels to tear a purple weapon attachment – the best item I've poached so far – from an unsuspecting player, their hard work undone in a single click.
After more than 10 hours with the Thief I'm still finding hidden layers in both of these skills. I've discovered by chance that her x-ray vision can see enemies through smoke, so when my duo partner plays as the smog-deploying Assassin we can delete entire squads while completely obscured.
The drone is, at its most basic, an effective forward scouting tool to find enemy players and pilfer their inventories. But what I didn't think about until I saw a clip on Reddit is how it changes engagements at extraction points. Rather than fight an enemy team who's trying to leave, the smart move is to find a safe corner, flip out your drone, and soar in as they're about to exit. They're almost guaranteed to have something worth grabbing.
I've also been trialling the drone as a distraction tool when I know enemies are nearby. I can ping them and annoy them from above – then, when they're trying to swat me away, I can exit the drone and run in, gun ready.
I also love how Bungie has played to the strengths of the extraction shooter genre by crafting specific loot, called "cores", that boost the class abilities of shells in novel ways. On one of my first runs on Outpost, Marathon's toughest map, I found a purple Thief core that renders me invisible when I deploy my drone. This means I can potentially get much closer to enemy teams before letting it fly, and it jives with my newfound distract-from-above playstyle. I know that a core exists that will automatically ping enemies if you leave your drone floating in place above an area, basically turning it into a UAV. As you can imagine, it's pretty high on my most wanted loot list.
I can't wait to keep discovering the nuances of Thief. Then, when I fancy a change, I know I've got five other characters to learn who are presumably just as deep. I spent time with the Assassin in the server slam: her invisibility cloak feels like standard stealth fare but what really sets her apart is the fact she automatically turns invisible when she steps in smoke. I can't wait to play her again, this time with stacks and stacks of smoke grenades and upgrades that make her even more powerful while she's hidden.
And then, presumably in 20 hours time, I'll turn to Marathon's medic, who can revive teammates from a distance with one extendable shockwave arm and stun an enemy with another arm simultaneously.
Just like Apex Legends, it's the prospect of mastering these characters that's driving me forward and will, I predict, keep me returning. I'm excited to see balance patches, new guns and maps but above all, if Bungie can keep growing this whacky roster – and conjuring skills as unique as a pickpocketing drone – then Marathon might stay in my rotation for a very long time indeed.
