Storyline
Marathon takes place after Halo, but was made before Halo if you get what I'm saying. You play as a crew member whose ship was taken by aliens called the Jjaro, because your stupid on board computer went rogue and was working with them. So now you have to fight through wave after wave of aliens trying to gather all the pieces together to fix the computer (Durandal). After you get through each level there's a checkpoint where you check in with the sane computer to see what to do next, update your map, and save your progress. Bungie went downhill with Halo in my opinion. This storyline does not just give you mission objectives at every checkpoint, but it sets up the story structure for the next two games in the Marathon trilogy.
Difficulty
May I say, s$%# this is a hard game. I've tried playing on all five difficulty settings, and if you're b$%#@g about how hard Halo is in Legendary...you ain't seen nothing yet. The settings are as follows: Kindergarten, Easy, Normal, Major Damage, and Total Carnage. Total carnage you can't even get out of the hallway without seeing 15 red triangles heading straight toward you like frat guys to a hot, drunk college girl. Not only are there tons of aliens attacking you, there's still the problem of the rogue computer. The puzzles in marathon are complex and require some time to figure out. Many times there will be a switch or a lever you will miss in the chaos, and that's the one thing you need to stop the fucking wall from crushing you. There's traps as well, such as pools of lava, acid, sewage, lack of oxygen (one level), yada yada, yada. You can swim through all of these, but your armor will be depleted in a matter of seconds, so it's best you look around for some switches to push or levers to pull.
Graphics
Before you say these graphics suck, just wait till I tell you this was made in 1994, exclusively for mac, which is why no one I know has heard of Marathon before. It was one of the first 3D first person shooter games. The monsters are a bit pixely, and the explosions are nothing to look at, but I'm asking you to overlook this for the good of the game. At the time, this was top notch graphics.
Weapons
There's seven weapons: fist, pistol, assault rifle, fusion gun, rocket launcher, flamethrower, and some sort of Pfhor weapon. I haven't seen any weapon that is too overpowered. Bungie did a good job of making some of the more powerful weapons' ammo hard to find. It wasn't like you had only one can of fuel for the the flamethrower for three levels, but you can only use it 3 or 4 times before you have to get some more ammo, which is protected by some trap or more aliens. Multiplayer
Yes, there is multiplayer. I don't know if the original game file will still play multiplayer, but there is something called Aleph One, released by Bungie which is just an open source version of the game. ''The basic premise of the game is to have the best kill-to-death ratio of all competing players and/or teams''. Each map could hold up to eight players. I only played this once, and I remember that the gravity threw me off because of the map I was on. It's a bit like Doom game play for multiplayer. I wasn't too into it, but then again when I first played it I was around 9 years old.Music
It's a bit techno and fast paced, sometimes eerie, depending on what part of the game you are on. This is the music from the 3rd game of the trilogy: Marathon 3: Infinity, and the 2nd game: Marathon 2: Durandal
Check it out!
Overall I give this a 9.5/10. It is a very well rounded game with a good storyline and plenty of 'missions' that won't question whether you passed the retard test.
