I played parts of the original Marathon prior to its official release in 1994 and haven’t stopped playing this many years later. The gameplay of this scenario is excellent - a nice set of classic-style Marathon maps. I like how each level is somehow different in feel, design, and appearance, with a lot of tense and not-so-easy gameplay. Quite a few times, the gameplay is fast and furious with a sense of do-or-die panic. This is easily in my top 5 scenarios of all time.

This is a review from a casual player who’s gone through the original Marathon campaign a few times over the years. I just finished this scenario on Normal difficulty, and it was excellent. Possibly the best set of classic-style Marathon maps I’ve played. The Durandal chapter in particular stood out.

The best maps are those that capture the spirit of the originals while bearing little actual resemblance. I did get stuck on a couple of maps that did feel rough and confusing, like "Do Flares come Standard?", but those were exceptions. I’d actually recommend this to new players before the original Bungie campaign.

It's amazing how well the gameplay with just the original weapons and monsters still hold up. It still gives me adrenaline after all these years, a real sense of tension and momentum. A testament to both the map makers and the game design. This was way more fun to return to than playing Halo CE for example.

Having a total blast playing through, and how it cleverly quotes the original campaign is always a treat.

In answer to Dylan_Dog's first point in his review - being restricted to the m2 shapes, it should be subject to m2 shapes mods including the "Transparent Liquids" (With modification to the plugin.xml file to allow the scenario) or XBLA texture mods that already have transparent liquids enabled, e.g. Community Freeverse Plugin or TheDoc45's M2 Super Plugin. Works for me so far.

The combat and setpieces really are the highlight here, showing just how far the reinterpretation could go. The fact the maps could be either very different or more like remakes keeps you on your toes. I found a few issues, however (obvious spoilers):

• Transparent Liquids do not work, seemingly because of it being a separate scenario. It's unfortunate, they'd look really good with the architecture.

• In "Things Betwixt Gender Coffin", there is a potential softlock. A slow-raising door that leads to one of the breakables can actually be closed by one of the aliens hiding behind it. I realized what had happened a bit too late...

• The door near the second terminal in "Major Exercise Agnostic Thermogenesis" that you open from behind has a strange noclip-like effect if you walk into it while it's closed.

• There's some sort of texture oversight in "Do Flares Come Standard?" that sticks out particularly, where one of the elevators is made fully out of ill-fitting door textures.

• In the very final battle of the set, many enemies will end up just standing around doing nothing because of the vanilla AI limits (presumably), although you might consider this a non-issue.

There was also a red barrel sprite that... danced(?) by mirroring itself, but somehow I felt that was intentional...