Last night marked the start of the Marathon Server Slam beta ahead of the game's full release next week, and it's certainly been popular so far — it's reached a peak of 143,621 concurrent players on Steam alone!
But what about the impressions? Well, the Xbox Store is notoriously difficult to judge because of how people tend to leave unconstructive reviews on there, but for what it's worth, the rating is 2.7/5 on the US version of the Xbox Store based on almost 400 reviews so far.
You can't see any ratings for Steam, so let's look to the critics — the outlets who have already had a chance to share their thoughts after 24 hours with the game. We've found a few reviews / impressions, and we'll leave them below:
Push Square (Positive)
"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."
Kotaku (Mixed)
"At the moment, I’m not sure if I like this game or just want to like it. It looks great, sounds awesome, and when you can pull off a cool escape, it feels amazing. It also has an incredible style that is unlike any game out there. But clunky controls that took tweaking to improve, annoying turrets, and a short time-to-kill make it tricky for me to enthusiastically recommend Marathon at the moment. Do I really like Marathon? Or am I just in love with its world and visuals, and also nervous about another live-service shooter eating s**t? More data is required."
Indy100 (Positive)
"It's still early days but so far, I've really enjoyed Marathon Server Slam. This game is genuine PvPvE as everyone and everything is out to get you. It makes the likelihood of failing runs and losing all of your loot a lot higher but running in full squads and taking advantage of unlimited free loadouts early on is the best way to progress in the first few hours to obtain a good stash of loot before putting it on the line."
Forbes (Mixed)
"Marathon has so far failed to get me on board with the extraction shooter genre, albeit, sure, it’s early, and I need to give it more of a chance. The genre, to me, has always felt like a big time-waster. One bad run, possibly with deaths you couldn’t even avoid, and you can lose that great gear it took a zillion games to find. Even the “easy” Rook runs of pure scavenging can be annoying if you step on a UESC mine or something, and you’ve just wasted 10-15 minutes. Maybe you didn’t lose anything, but you sure didn’t gain anything, not even XP in that case. I don’t find any of that fun."
Obviously it's still very early days here, and it's going to take a while to gauge how much the community is enjoying Marathon and how popular it'll prove — but for now, you may as well go and check it out for yourself.
All you need to do is head over to the Marathon Server Slam page on the Xbox Store and download the game. There are no restrictions on needing to be a Game Pass member or anything like that, so go and have at it this weekend!