by I uh… actually don’t have any more Infinity jokes. I used what little of them I had during the Let’s Play. So instead, I will just call it Marathon 3: The Really Really Big Number!
I won’t belabor my points with this one–for the first-time player, Infinity is in many ways, the inferior game of the Marathon franchise. Tasked with putting reality back together (it sounds much cooler than it is), our Mjolnir Cyborg gears up for one final adventure, this time through a corridor of infinite realities.
You see, the problem is that for the uninitiated, Infinity is Marathon’s unruly hazing treatment. Let me ask you something–do you like watching TV? Well, what if I told you there’s this new way of watching it? We’ll hook a device up to your remote set on a randomly generated timer between 10 and 50 minutes. Each time the timer goes off, we’ll switch your channel! Doesn’t that sound like fun?
…it doesn’t. It also isn’t.
Infinity attempts to bring the vastness of unbridled possibility to your computer monitor, but instead is a confusing mess. One moment your in one timeline–the next, you’re in a completely different one. Thoth (or at least I think it’s Thoth) pops up and basically starts jerking you around to different realities, without any real objective or purpose. Your goal in each timeline is to… uh… er… “do stuff?” I mean, that’s it. You just follow the orders of whoever is barking them at you in the timeline and they generally don’t have anything to do with actually putting reality back together. Sometimes your following orders from Tycho to kill Durandal. Sometimes your following orders from Durandal to kill Tycho. Then if you’re really luck, you’ll go into a new reality where you’re following orders from Tycho again to kill Durandal. It’s just not that interesting, and comes off more as random than intellectually engaging.
The game doesn’t explore any new concepts or ideas–in fact, regarding mechanical assets, there’s nothing new at all about this game. No new guns, enemies or characters (unless you count the Durandal-God-AI-Hybrid which I don’t). Instead of putting you in new scenarios, you’re just living out the old ones on new maps. It’s made worse by the series of pretentious ramblings that you are forced to ingest from Thoth, as he goes on and on about meaningless poetic concepts of infinity. Have you ever read a teenager’s short-stories, and the teenager thinks they are really edgy and deep? It’s basically like that, except in game form.
Other than that, there’s not really anything else to say that I didn’t go over in my review of Marathon 1 or 2, which should tell you how little “new” content there actually is here. At the end, you flip a couple switches that cause some unspeakable evil (that possibly never existed in the first place) to vanish. Then The Durandal-God-AI-Hybrid prattles off some nonsense about how you had control over the infinite realities the whole time, and he now knows what you are–“Destiny.” Now, it’s cool that several years later, Bungie would make a game called Destiny, but honestly the Durandal Hybrid could have said that he realized I was a Norwegian Snapple-gargling Spoon Blanket and it would have made as much sense. Infinity is nothing more than a lot of hot air and some noise, but no substance or value in what it’s trying to sell you.
I’ve heard that Infinity is better played through a 2nd time, once you know what to expect and can just enjoy getting to play through another set of Aleph One levels. That’s fair–there are games that I love that were much better the second time through. That being said, I have to put this in Tier 3–recommended to be played only by fans of the series, or those who’ve wiki’d the plot before going in. Seriously–it’s that bad. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but your experience might be better if you just don’t even read the terminals. That’s nuts considering how great the terminals were in 1 and 2. Ah well, they tried something new, and for that I can at least respect their attempt.
If you’re interested in watching a Let’s Play I recently did of the game, feel free to see the link below. Otherwise, chalk this one up to an important piece of Bungie’s history that went a little too far off the beaten path.
Marathon Infinity Game Download
