Steam Reviews Split Marathon Into Two Different Games — And Both Audiences Are Right

Steam reviews for Marathon tell two completely different stories about the same game. Players under 50 hours are wrestling with technical issues, matchmaking frustration, and visual problems. Players over 150 hours are posting about singing grunge songs with randoms and calling the game "fully addictive."

The 1-hour reviewer who left a positive review but said "its to bright for me on a ultra wide" and "takes to long for me to get in a match" represents one Marathon experience. The 303-hour player who wrote "Im not generally a fan of extraction shooters, but this one grabbed me. Im fully addicted" represents a completely different one.

What's fascinating is both groups are leaving positive reviews, but for totally different reasons. Short-term players are being generous despite clear problems. The 1-hour player still recommended it after listing three dealbreaker issues. The 35-hour reviewer explicitly pushed back against "negative press" and called criticism "sorely misguided."

Meanwhile, the 670-hour player just posted "season 2 coming soon quit your job" with zero elaboration. The 170-hour reviewer summed it up: "if ur not a [toxic player], this game isnt that bad at all.. very well done for a shooting game."

There's exactly one negative review in the sample — 299 hours played, warning others about "migraines." Even Marathon's harshest critic played for 300 hours first.

Reddit went completely dark this cycle while Bungie pushed three separate updates, including a major security system overhaul and the shift from Sponsored Marsh to Sponsored Perimeter. The vocal community that usually dissects every balance change just... isn't talking.

This creates a weird information vacuum. Steam reviews capture the broad player experience — technical struggles for newcomers, genuine addiction for long-term players — but there's no Reddit discussion to provide context for why people bounce off or stick around. The 152-hour player posting about randos singing Pearl Jam is pure gold, but we have no community thread explaining whether voice chat toxicity is actually getting better.

The 320-hour reviewer nailed Marathon's appeal in one run-on sentence: "game very good and fun gunplay and cool lore and dopamine release triggering gold loot and door opener AI guy on a spaceship that is also the moon or something." That's either the best or worst game description ever written, and without Reddit's usual analysis threads, we can't tell which.