Marathon 2: Durandal (Win95)

By: The J Man

The original Marathon lit up the limited Macintosh charts, and gave gamers who chose to take a bite out of the rainbow apple some reassurance that perhaps they had made the right choice of platform after all (Myst would soon offer a similar ego boost). It turned out to be a fine game, and just as plot-heavy and entertaining as the hype had promised (since we don't do Mac games on JGR, my thoughts on the original can be found here). Unfortunately, it never made the port to the PC. Instead, the sequel hopped over to Windows, where it hoped to recruit a whole new contingent to Bungie's 7th Column. But without the previous game to offer any grounding, Marathon 2: Durandal got lost in the FPS shuffle.

Marathon introduced you to the Pfhor; a galactic slaver race making an unannounced attack on the human colony of Tau Ceti. Standing in the way was the colony ship UESC Marathon and its three artificial intelligences, each of which put your combat skills to good use when they could. The most notorious of the three was Durandal; an AI who had long bristled at his mundane duties and achieved rampancy - loosely, Bungie's term for AIs that go insane, but really more akin to reaching a higher plane of thought. Durandal fears the collapse of the universe (a legitimate threat for him, as time has no real meaning for AIs) and after the Phfor attack freed him from his "slavery," he set about looking to secure his own preservation. You became a tool to help him do this, and in return, he assisted the humans insofar as it would assist in saving his digital hide. The ending left you with a victory; the invasion repelled, the colonists saved. Durandal then bid you adieu and absconded to cruise around the galaxy in a stolen Pfhor vessel.

A sequel must not have been seriously planned, because the beginning of Marathon 2 goes back for some revisionist history. The Pfhor mount a second attack that successfully destroys the colony. Somehow Durandal makes a trip back to kidnap you ahead of said attack, before returning to where the final text of Marathon left off. You begin the sequel by teleporting onto the planet Lh'owon. The crew of Durandal's stolen ship are the S'pht - one of the races enslaved by the Pfhor, who sucessfully rebelled from the slavers (with your help) at the end of the first Marathon. Durandal has taken you to this planet to assist them in searching for their lost thirteenth clan. Essentially, the Pfhor are now launching all-out war on the freed S'pht, who believe their only chance at survival lies in uniting with their lost brothers. But does the 13th clan really exist? Can you find them before the Pfhor battle group overwhelms your rebel band? And what exactly is Durandal's interest in all this?

Confusing? First, you may have heard the Marathon series described as an "FPS with a plot," but not really believed it. I think we just put any uncertainties about that to bed. Second, it highlights how important the original Marathon is in the story, and how odd it is to simply port over only the sequel. You're missing out on crucial character introductions. You won't understand the backstory and betrayals. You won't get neat little references, like the level where you return to the Pfhor ship from the first game and see its layout unchanged. True, you don't need to play the first to enjoy the FPS action, but it removes a lot of its power, and a lot of the point. I think this is one of the major reasons Marathon 2 failed on the PC.

As for the action, it's mostly identical to the first. You can reconfigure controls to your liking, but navigating and shooting basically mirror other major FPS titles. Marathon's engine allows you to look up and down to hit distant enemies or look for switches. You can also use a mouse to control the tilt and direction of your view, but you get the stretchy 2.5-D distortion when your view shifts, which happens frequently enough with mouseloook to get nauseating. All weapons have a secondary fire mode that triggers things like charged shots, grenade launchers, or dual-wielding, depending on the gun. You have an air meter that allows you to tackle underwater sections of the levels, and basic swimming control additions that pretty much amount to "sink to the bottom" or "swim to the top." Air is recharged at stations scattered around the level, same as the previous game.

Your health acts the same way, with the ability for some stations to charge your health two or three times past its standard maximum. These health rechargers are central to what makes Marathon's combat unique. There's at least one on every level, and as long as you can get back to it, you are theoretically invincible - there's no limit or delay to how many times you can recharge. This is countered by long gauntlets that prevent you from returning to recharge, heavy enemies that liberally damage your health, and the stringent saving system.

You can only save at specific terminals inside the levels. There are no checkpoints, quicksaves, or even autosaves at the beginning of a new level. If you die, you go back to your last save, wherever it may be. Trick is, you don't always get a station at the end of one level or the beginning of the first. The intent seems to be to create tense stretches where you are forced to cautiously guard your life and search out your next save station - balancing your rechargeable health with periods of serious vulnerability. It's certainly effective, but also often frustrating. This does at least seem to be a little toned-down from the first Marathon, with the inclusion of extremely rare health pickups and a pretty solid guarantee that the save station won't be obnoxiously far from the beginning of the level. You'll still have to pick the correct path, of course, and Marathon 2's winding levels can often make this a chore.

Fighting can easily get chaotic if you get surrounded.

There's nothing overly special to the combat. Enemy AI has no particular tricks, and most of the challenge relies on large, mixed groups, or the frequency of powerful units. Though it's standard stuff, it is fun. The fights also tend to factor into the plot, giving them some extra weight. Every level begins and ends with a terminal, where Durandal or others feed you plot and objectives through text and images. It works to keep you aware of the situation at all times without being obtrusive, and can actually pump you up for the level to come. Durandal describes how he'll be throwing you into the thick of the fighting, how this particular battle is crucial to maintaining your presence on the planet, and then you're teleported in, guns blazing, to deliver nothing short of an epic ass-kicking. Or the simple satisfaction in one particular level when you finally take to the fight directly to the Pfhor. It's also worth noting that each engagement (as far as the plot goes) is unique, and doesn't rely on clichés or cheapen moments by reusing them - none of the old "you have to help defend this section of a human base... now here's another... and now this one too."

The BOBs make a return, but in a helpful role this time. In the original Marathon, the Born On Board humans were innocent nuisances, flailing around, shouting, and often getting stuck in your way. The new BOBs have guns, and teleport into the level in groups to assist you in certain battles. The ones they'll participate in are pre-determined, but the battles themselves aren't scripted, so pretty much the AI slings lead at each other and offers a nice distraction without a guarantee of actually being helpful. This does mean you're not supposed to shoot them anymore, because now they'll fight back. The return of the infiltrators (fake, exploding BOBs that look like the real deal, but have subtle behavioral differences) capitalize on this. On the evil hand, now there's even more of a reason to kill every BOB because now they drop ammo.

Weapon art has been redesigned to look sleeker and have expanded detail, but their functions remain identical to the first. The alien gun now shoots like a pulse flamethrower (instead of a machine gun), but that's the only difference. The sole new weapon is the double-barrel shotgun, and its implementation is simply exquisite. I think most of my love for it is in the lead-up and introduction. None of your battles so far, including the first half of this game, are particularly easy. Even when you turn your machine gun on tight groups of standard Pfhor, they're still pretty hardy and slinging attacks all the way. Armored troops take a beating and give one in return, requiring lots of hit-and-fades and retreats around corners. Then you get the shotgun...

Remember in The Road Warrior how there's this little subplot of Max trying to get shells for his sawed-off? It's empty for a while... he finds one but it fizzles right when he needs it... he's constantly being let down. Then, finally, he gets the good shells, there's a perfect moment to use them, he aims, and WHAM - it sounds like the loudest fucking gun you've ever heard. Cue cheers from the audience. Almost exactly the same idea happens here. Unlike all your previous weapons, the shotgun totally surprises you with its ability to take out the toughest enemies you've faced so far in one shot - and you get two of them right in a situation where a swarm of medium to tough baddies are charging. So with a boomstick in each hand, you're cutting through guys left and right, while recocking with that little spin move from Terminator 2. Effortlessly dropping hordes of guys that were giving you headaches just a few levels ago is quite satisfying. I love that fucking gun, and with the beautiful timing of its first appearance, it's easily one of the best implementations of shotguns in gaming history.

There's nothing too wrong going on here graphically. Textures look sharper and have more detail than in the previous game. You could argue that many of the textures are too bland and flat. They are heavy on the earth tones, but unlike the first game, I didn't find any of the texture work substandard or boring. The problem, carried over from the original, is that there don't appear to be enough textures to cover the entire game. Many areas reuse the same texture tiled and do look boring, as well as confusing when you're trying to navigate. At least the problem of level after level looking identical is mostly reduced here, and your globetrotting gives better excuses to shake up the art than simply going to new sections of the same spaceship did. Not too much about the engine appears to have changed, except for the new underwater areas with occasional flowing currents. The engine also allows you to actively raise and lower water levels with switches (very similar to Dark Forces), which gets good face-time as the subject of a few puzzles.

So what are my complaints? The big one is that there are far too many "gotcha!" moments, especially in a game with such a restrictive saving system. There are tons of tricks and unexpected effects throughout the levels, like platforms that lower into lava, health rechargers that suddenly stop working as you follow your objectives, or heavies guarding early health stations that pretty much guarantee a low-health player is going to have to play the mid-point of the previous level over again. My favorite example is the final boss. You fight these floating weapon platforms in the last level. They already take tons of damage while dishing out the same, but also hit the ground and detonate tremendously when killed. The very last battle takes place in a tiny room with powerful enemies and one of these floating tanks. First of all, just running around and avoiding getting hit is annoying in such tight quarters. Then when you kill the tank, it explodes and inevitably takes you with it. You have to time everything perfectly so that your very last round hits the tank when you are the maximum distance from the thing that you can be (remember, this is a tiny room). Even then, you're taking damage, so you can't just kill it with your last breath. Took me four times, with each restart coming from a save a few minutes earlier in the level.

The entire game also relies too much on teleporting. You will rarely see ammo lying around, because you have to walk over to that particular spot - with no prompting to do so - to trigger it to teleport in. To look at it another way, your pickups are invisible until you get close, so get ready to explore those levels. Same thing with some enemies. Just like Terminator: Future Shock, enemies can and will teleport behind you for an ambush, around you when you hit a trigger, or even right the fuck in front of you as you're walking. Unlike Future Shock, it doesn't happen every few feet, and they don't come in firing, so you at least have a chance. But you'll need to have fast reflexes to dodge surprise fire, or sharp ears to hear when your back is no longer secure.

Underwater sections still have bad guys, and you're sluggish and can't fire your guns to boot.

And of course, the physics. Like the original, Marathon 2 has a strange implementation of gravity. You're slow to fall (allowing you to hop over large gaps, as a true "jump" button doesn't exist), but also extremely "floaty." This makes things like stairs a cast-iron motherfucker, as you leave the top stair and glide right over the rest. You can't stop when the engine decides you're in mid-air, even if mid-air is just a millimeter off the ground, so frequently ledges send you sliding off into enemies, lava pits, or other assorted death traps. I can't count the number of times I rounded a corner, hit stairs, and essentially fell down them like Chevy fucking Chase, right into the waiting guns of the Pfhor below. Frustrations don't end there. Physics are applied to explosions, so you or your enemies are pushed away from the center. This means that enemies that explode after they die can (and occasionally do) have their corpses flung into your face before popping, damaging you heavily if not killing you outright. Unfortunately, these fleshy missiles never seem to work out in your favor.

Ultimately, it's a solid game, but I wouldn't play it if it weren't for the plot. Action is sparse compared to the competition, and the levels often confusing in layout and barren. Limited ammo and limited save opportunities mean this can't exactly be played like a run-and-gun shooter, and takes away much of the pick-up-and-play fun of other FPSs. Both of those can make it seem a little too prissy, "intellectual," and boring to outsiders not playing for the plot. And if you should try and play without reading Durandal's messages, eventually you're going to get lost or trapped by design, as levels don't end when you hit the exit with incomplete objectives. Simply put, the gameplay is good enough to support the plot, but not that great alone. Again, it’s easy to see why the PC crowd didn't warm to this without context.

Marathon 2 does clean up some flaws from the original, namely in adding some needed variety to its environments. The plot is an excellent continuation, and magnificent at setting up noteworthy battles. When it works, it goes far beyond simply shooting 2D sprites, and far closer to playing a keystone role in a futuristic resistance. However, the choice to give PC players only a third of the story - and drop them right in the middle, no less - hurts the series immeasurably for the PC crowd. The sequel does feature a contained story arc, but without the backstory and experiences from the previous game, a lot of the point is going to go right over players' heads. Do yourself a favor and check out the first (all three are freeware now). If you still want more, Marathon 2 will be more than ready to deliver.

-reviewed 1/18/08 - game copyright 1996 Bungie Studios

Great continuation of the story. Improved graphics. New water sections, replays automatically saved to hard drive. Awesome shotguns.

Not as great if you haven't played the original first. Casual players will be bored - this isn't as uncomplicated as Doom. Physics, traps, and saving system still annoying.

	8
	8
	6
	8
	80%

Marathon 2: Durandal on MobyGames
Marathon Trilogy downloads (freeware) plus Aleph One PC emulator

"Basically, the attack failed because Bobs aren't fireproof, and the Pfhor flooded the area with lava." - Durandal