Allow me to start by saying Marathon is the first Extraction Shooter I have ever played, so I didn't have previous experience from older extraction games to draw upon for my thoughts on Marathon. ------------------------------------ I genuinely enjoyed my time playing Marathon. I liked the atmosphere of the world, the stakes and tension of knowing one wrong move could cost you your run and what you have looted so far. The gunplay feels good on a PS5 controller, and the NPC enemies are a fair challenge. I died a fair number of times to them, just as I have to other Runners, and each time I knew it was because I made a mistake in how I engaged them, or let my guard down when I thought I was the only Runner in the area. The lore and mystery are great. I do not have in-depth knowledge of Marathon's original lore, but I have a good feeling that you won't need to know the lore of the original trilogy to engage with the new game's story, and it will be able to stand on its own. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that certain lore entries within the Codex have [b][i]audio recordings[/i][/b] to go along with them. It has me yearning to see the same done in Destiny 2, where characters with voice actors can narrate the lines within lore entries about them. It is a great way to draw you further into the lore and what happened to the colony. I want to thoroughly explore each map and find new lore entries wherever I can, to see how many of them have recorded voicelines. On the gameplay side of things, the Sponsored Kits are a blessing when you are a new player. You don't have to risk any loot you have managed to extract from previous runs, or loot from ranking up Factions and the Season Pass, if you don't feel like it, and you can go in with a free Sponsored Kit as many times as you want. It works alongside Rook to give a risk-free onboarding experience where you can get used to exploring the world, fighting the NPCs and other Runners, and learn about the Runner Shells themselves. It also doesn't hurt that there are sets of challenges where exfilling with each Faction's Sponsored Kits awards you with a Shell skin styled after each corporation. I spent a fair amount of time in-game pursuing those skins. I spent most of my runs Solo, and I believe the games you load into for solo players are well-balanced in that regard. I really had to pay attention to my surroundings with no radar. Your runs can end quickly if you don't. I have both been ambushed and been the ambusher, and misjudged the UESC enemy density. No two runs feel the same, either, and can lead to either thrilling triumphs, blunders that instantly lead to failure, surprise encounters, or even some close calls. One of the few times I did do a three-man run, through the crew fill-in, we accidentally stumbled into the Wraith Warden in Overflow and had to fight for our lives. With two Medics (including myself), we were downed and revived several times before we finally decided to bolt. Even then, I still haven't figured everything out. I only looked up help once to figure out what you have to do with Tox Clear events, and only when I started to wind down. I am still learning how the various in-map secrets and events work, and I look forward to figuring things out when I play the game after launch. And this is just the Server Slam. Post-Launch, there will be the third map and sixth Runner Shell to try out, the Cryo Archive when it eventually launches, and everything else that will be in the main game that wasn't in the Server Slam. ------------------------------------------------------------------ I will criticize the user interface somewhat, since you need to hover over mods and cores to distinguish which core has what ability, and there were a few things I needed time to figure out. However, some of it was self-inflicted; in a moment of silliness, I realized that what I had thought were mines I was laying around in certain places were, in fact, ammo crates that would do nothing except give whoever found them free ammo. The next might not be so much a criticism as me still getting used to extraction looters, but my vault filled up very quickly, and I had to constantly manage it whenever I got new loot from a successful exfil or rank-up. But loot is meant to be used, and there are reward paths and upgrades to increase your vault space. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Overall, I enjoyed my experience with the Server Slam, and I intend to buy the full game. I look forward to seeing more of the world and the story, and to seeing how successful I can be in future runs. [spoiler]Moderator edit: This thread has been moved to #Offtopic, a more appropriate forum for this offtopic discussion. Feel free to private message the moderator who moved your post, link to topic, for further clarification about why this topic was moved.[/spoiler]