Marathon is out now and you may be wondering when we’ll publish our PS5 review. After all, this is a major first-party game from Sony and represents the culmination of the console maker’s $3 billion Bungie acquisition.
The truth is, you won’t read our review for a little while.
As a live service game, the extraction shooter is expected to evolve over the coming weeks and months. Crucially, its end-game zone Cryo Archive – an area said to have “raid-like puzzle solving” in addition to “close-quarters combat” – will not release until later in the month.
Bungie has asked critics to consider not submitting scored reviews until this is available, and we’re going to respect that.
It’s important to underline that this is not a mandate or a requirement: we, like all other publications, are free to rate the game right now if we so choose. We’re sure some other outlets will.
But we feel it’s important for us to test the full scope of what Bungie’s created, so we’re going to wait until we’ve been able to truly try this end-game mode before we submit our review.
We appreciate this is an unusual situation and we know some of you will have expected a score as soon as possible. For now, we’d like to direct you to our Hands On impressions of the recent Server Slam.
We’ll be back later in the month with our full review, so stay tuned.