Marathon’s ongoing Server Slam has given the gaming community a taste of what Bungie is offering the booming extraction shooter genre. So far, the reception has been… mixed.
Marathon is unlike any of the other extraction shooters out there right now; a curious balance between the fast-paced action of Arc Raiders and slower, more atmospheric options like Hunt: Showdown.
As you can imagine, the most dedicated players have already grinded dozens of hours of Marathon, and they’ve come back with some tips to help players improve, including one I noticed myself during my brief spell with the game. ASaltyGamer13 and others chimed in on a thread full of ‘veteran’ tips on the game’s subreddit.
Keep It Down
The one piece of advice I find particularly salient is to stop running around with your knife out. Yes, you move faster, and if you’re sprinting to an exfiltration point with a couple of minutes left in the game, then your haste may be warranted. However, I promise that you’re the loudest person in the Dire Marsh when you’re running around like that.
Movement and gunfire are very audible in Marathon, and you can pick up both from a surprising distance. If you’re near a team of people sprinting with their knives out, the chances are that you’ll hear them stomping along. Better yet, their guns aren’t equipped, so your squad will likely win the ambush without much difficulty.
As pointed out in the aforementioned thread, Marathon’s time-to-kill is reasonably quick, so if your team is caught in a situation where they can’t immediately return fire, then you stand little chance of getting out alive.
The thread advocates patience for teams looking to skirmish in Marathon. Roam around the map and keep your ears open; gunfire can be heard from very far away, so a patient team need only follow the noise and strike when the time is right to earn some easy loot.
It’s this aspect of the game where Marathon is most similar to Hunt: Showdown, as, in a way, fighting the non-player characters is somewhat discouraged. The elite-tier enemies require a lot of resource investment to take down, and protracted battles with the AI create a racket that can be heard from miles away. It’s a contrast to something like Arc Raiders, where player-versus-environment is a larger part of the experience.
You can quickly burn through ammo and medical supplies fighting the NPCs, so only engage groups of them when necessary.
Marathon’s detractors say avoiding combat is anti-fun and not in the spirit of the genre, but I would argue that’s just recency bias based on the success of Arc Raiders.
The genre was founded on slower-paced, more consequential gameplay. There’s a place for something like Marathon that straddles the line between the old and the new.
Marathon
- Released
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March 5, 2026
- ESRB
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Teen / Animated Blood, Language, Violence, In-Game Purchases, Users Interact
- Multiplayer
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Online Multiplayer, Online Co-Op
- Cross-Platform Play
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Full
