I was going to make a joke post and say "Girls really do be going through it" but. Man. I didn't expect this to leave me bawling at the end. Nor how well directed and written it was.

The plot being layers of symbolism about the self destructive nature of love and not letting go. The oppressiveness of sacrificing freedom for security where even feeling too much is considered destructive to the balance of things. It all hit me pretty hard at this point in my life.

All of it presented in a tight, mechanically focused survival horror game where the oppressiveness is felt even down to how your inventory works. This game is an all timer.

So yeah. Girls really do be going through it.

I’ve played a lot of retro shooters in my life but this one has to be the most strange one from a gameplay perspective. Everyone throws the term “clunky” around, most of the time in the wrong context, but I say with no hesitation that The Citadel is one of the clunkiest shooters I have ever played in my life because it suffers so much of an identity crisis. It wants to be an old-school shooter in similar vein of Wolfenstein 3D yet it just adds so much military shooter garbage. All weapons need to be reloaded, with even the simple act of reloading being a mess. For weapons like the shotguns and revolver that reload each bullet/shell individually you need to mash the reload button as pressing R once will only reload one bullet into the chamber. It just doesn’t fit the game. Reloading magazine fed weapons not only take too long, but also have another feature where pressing R twice quickly will discard the entire magazine for a quicker reload, which once again is another option that’s just there for some reason.
All guns have horrible bullet spread and recoil too which should be considered a crime for a “retro shooter”. Aiming down sights also feel glitchy and weird as there’s a second delay before you actually transition from iron sights to hip-firing.
The HUD and various menus are hideous to look at. There’s so much visual clutter with a needlessly complicated health/stamina/food system. Stamina drains when you sprint, kick and double jump (yes, a stamina bar that affects double jumping, we’ve hit rock bottom) and can be refilled with oxygen canisters. Food I still have no idea what it does other than heal you and give you a bit of stamina back. You can also lean left and right around corners and in the settings there’s an option to turn on weapon durability. Yes, Weapon durability…
This makes me think they tried to make a more slower survival-based military-esque shooter but then switched to a retro shooter because that’s more popular and as a result the game is a horrible mashup of retro shooter and military shooter design choices.
There’s a lack of enemy variety and all of them have the most eardrum bursting death sounds with all their anime girl screams. Some enemies I’ve seen fall through the floor and die and bigger enemies are put into areas which are obviously not designed to incorporate them.
I could go on about this game’s problems but I got this game gifted to me in the new Boomer shooter Humble Bundle so I don’t exactly feel like I’ve been robbed but I can definitely say this isn’t a high point in the bundle.

if you think there is a game out there as chillllll or as freshhhh as this then that is just not true. no song will ever go as hard as tim_trance.ogg and no game will have an art style like i would say um.,,.,.,.,. about 2% (like the milk) as good as this games art style. you cant compare ANYTHING to this game. the only thing comparable to the chillness of this game is the very concept of chillness itself.,,.,.,. find it on some abandonware site and experience that chillness for yourself i am genuine in how chill i think this game is

Honestly I think this game is at least as good as the first. Both have their own quirks, their own little issues that occasionally get in the way of the experience, but man are the highs high. Marathon 2 keeps the slower-paced puzzly focus of Marathon 1 (vs other shooters of the time), but ramps the action and the scale up tremendously. The combat is huge, smooth, dynamic, and has the beginnings of what would become Halo’s unique uses for each weapon, instead of DOOM’s “use the best thing you got” ethos. It’s just so god damn fun.

Marathon 2 runs on a new engine, with significantly larger sprites and environments, as well as not confining the viewport to 2/3rds of the screen. As chill vibes as the HUD in M1 was, it’s nice to see more of the environment. And what lovely environments they are!! Even more than the first one, there’s a HUGE variety of colors and themes used in the levels. Particularly there’s been a lot of work put into liquid rendering (water, lava, some kinda gross green sludge, some kinda PURPLE ALIEN LAVA). This is in service to the greatly expanded role of your oxygen meter: Now a large majority of the levels have you scuba diving or.. slowly burning to death. For the most part this is welcome: The oxygen meter got used in like 2 levels of the first game. The way they’ve implemented water traversal kinda saps some of the fun out though. You move slower, which makes sense, and can’t fire your guns, which I guess makes sense but damn I don’t love needing to either run around or slowly punch the weakest enemies in the game to death 10-12 times. I’m not really sure how it’d be fixable though, and it does help enhance the feeling of exploring every inch of these levels, which (for me) feels like the main swing of Marathon.

Beyond that and some slightly confusing level design though, the main thrust of the story is just fantastic. The last one was good, but this one outclasses it HARD. As the title implies, you spend most of the game working with Durandal, one of the AIs from your ship in the first game, deep in the stages of AI rampancy (a kind of death by overthinking). Durandal’s lines are magnetic, full of wit and anger and the thickest prose Bungie’s ever had in a game (at least out of the ones I’ve played). On top of that though, this game brings themes of mythology and exploration (not just in the level design now!) to the forefront for most of the game, running you through explorations of Citadels and Caverns and Bunkers, trying to find a more advanced civilization before your enemies do. It’s engrossing to the max, and justifies the somewhat more labyrinthine level design vs the first game wonderfully.

I think you should play this game. Play it on whatever difficulty you want, play it in whatever form you want, look up guides for the levels you get stuck on, just play it. It’s a master class in the slower side of boomer FPS design, the side that would ultimately become the norm in the 2000s. Even where it recycles the first game a bit, it does it bigger and better and ups the fun. I don’t really know how else to say it: It’s just really fucking great.