We can tell you one thing for free: Marathon isn’t another ARC Raiders-like extraction shooter. Where Embark’s phenomenal title is instantly fun and approachable for most gamers, Marathon is dense, brutally tough, and clearly catering to a more hardcore niche. And we think that’s a good thing.

That means, of course, that Marathon isn’t for everyone. There’s been the typical onslaught of “Concord 2” slander – something that bores us to tears, to be honest – but from our opening hours of the game, it’s clear that Bungie isn’t going for a homogenised take on the extraction genre.

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It’s aiming for those who love buildcrafting, sweaty PvE and PvP action, and it’s wrapping it all up in a surprisingly horror-tinged sci-fi world.

Our first few hours with Marathon, which is currently running a free Server Slam on PS5, were a lot. You’re ushered into the world with impeccable cinematics and animations, painting the picture of a greedy and callous universe, bursting at the seams with megacorporations.

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A long-lost colony ship named the Marathon has sent out a distress signal for the first time in over 100 years, and the megacorps are scrambling to salvage what they can of their investment.

That’s where you come in. You’re a runner, an uploaded consciousness in a synthetic shell, tasked with retrieving salvage and trying to piece together what happened to the Marathon and its colonies on Tau Ceti IV.

We honestly do get the complaints about the lack of a story campaign here, because between its set-up, artstyle, and environments, we were locked in with the lore quite quickly.

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But of course, this is a match-based extraction shooter. You gear up, explore, loot, and try to make it back alive, whilst avoiding or facing off against enemy AI and real-life players. And as we alluded to, this is a pretty hardcore entry that’ll appeal to fans of Escape from Tarkov or Hunt: Showdown, more than fans of ARC Raiders.

Immediately, we have to say, you can feel the Bungie pedigree at play here. Marathon looks incredible. We’d go as far as saying it’s the best-looking first-person shooter of the generation so far.

Bungie has leaned into a style called graphical realism, mixing bright bursts of colour and lighting with gritty details like scuffs, rubbish, and foliage. It’s a visual feast for the eyes, and we still found ourselves gazing into the skyboxes even after over five hours with the game.

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And once bullets start flying, there’s no doubt that Bungie has captured that innately satisfying gunplay that made Destiny one of the best FPS of its time. For those who loved popping a headshot on a Cabal in Destiny 2, you’re going to feel right at home here. And the dialled-in DualSense haptics mean that gunplay has a real punch to it.

We were taken aback by how tough Marathon can be. Most of our unsuccessful runs were down to AI enemies rather than real players. Enemy AI is ruthless, as it quickly moves around trying to find a flank. There are no enemies just standing around begging for headshots here.

With ammo limited and healing supplies a scarce commodity, you really have to consider whether you’ll even have a chance with some encounters, which gives Marathon a much slower pace and intense atmosphere than we expected. Through its sound design and visuals, it’s actually fairly eerie at times, tapping into an odd sense of cosmic horror.

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We’ll dive into all of that with our full review, but let’s get into our initial worry with Marathon: it’s dense. Really dense.

Marathon’s Server Slam features six different factions to level up with. Each offers quests to complete, its own upgrade trees, and requires a collection of materials to make some of those upgrades. In those early hours, you’re hounded with faction requests. It all looks nice, but it does take a moment to get your head around its menus.

When it comes to building out your gear, there are cores, shields, implants, weapon mods, equipment slots, and a variety of consumables that all do different things, but look sort of similar. And that's without even getting into the runner shells, which offer passive, tactical, and prime skills too.

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While ARC Raiders has shown what a casual extraction shooter can be, Marathon has the steeper learning curve that many long-term fans of the genre will have become accustomed to. For us, we enjoy learning the ropes, and we can already tell that Marathon has an impressive level of buildcrafting potential, but we suspect a lot of people will bounce off because of it.

Although Destiny 2 has its own onboarding issues, it is a lot more accessible, so if anyone is coming to Marathon purely for the Bungie appeal, get ready to sift through some menus.

Our other concern is PvP interaction. When they happen, they are tense, fun, and can be as sweaty as you like. The problem is, they don’t happen all that much. After a while, we stopped getting that feeling that someone could be watching, as the majority of matches were filled with explosive AI fights, with not a real player to be seen.

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Maybe we played in some particularly cautious lobbies, as everyone is still learning the ropes, but there may be some balancing in matchmaking required to encourage fights a little more.

What we can tell from the game so far, then, is that Marathon is more of a slow-burn than an instant hit of dopamine. For some, that's an instant write-off. But for us, players 100+ hours into ARC Raiders and dying for a true endgame, Marathon could offer that truly deep extraction shooter experience we're now yearning for.

Are you trying out the Marathon Server Slam this weekend? Let us know down in the comments below!