While attempting to teleport out of the Moon Man level the game crashes. Normally in a case like this I’d just use the level skip cheat to bypass the problematic level and continue with the campaign (see my review for Marathon Aeon where just such a thing occurred) but with Operation Tantalus it’s so confusingly nonlinear I have no idea what the next level would be, or how the level progression even works! So I was never able to complete the campaign.

The obvious thing that stands out about this campaign is that it’s non-linear. At the end of the first level you’re given the choice of three different missions/levels to tackle. I chose one, then shortly thereafter I again got a choice of three new missions/levels to complete. Meanwhile, the number of intra-level and inter-level teleports was excessive, so it was very easy for me to get confused about where I had gone and where I needed to go.

I like giving the player meaningful choices. Player agency is good! But the non-linearity of this campaign quickly became more of a liability than an asset. Firstly, it was too complicated, I have no idea how it worked, and it was never explained. Was I making progress going through these levels, or were some of them kicking me back like in Marathon Infinity? I have no idea. I was just making random choices, since plot-wise nothing seemed to make any difference. For example, one time when I was offered my pick of three missions/levels, one of them was to raid an armory. Well that seemed like a good source of weapons and ammo, both of which are in short supply for this campaign, so I chose to go to the armory. Instead, the bad guys intercepted my teleport signal and sent me into an arena level where I had to waste a bunch of my precious ammo fighting tough enemies, and if I chose the wrong exit door the ammo-less level would reset and I’d have to play it again and lose even more resources!!! So my choices seemed to be mostly illusionary, not real. Also, I kept finding ammo for weapons I didn’t have. Presumably, if I had made different level choices, I’d have those weapons, but how was I supposed to know what choices were “best?”

Anyways, the first level starts out with a neat gimmick. You have a tough human marine as an ally to help you kill all the monsters on the level! How the dev got this ally to move around the map and (sometimes) kill things using the primitive Marathon AI I have no idea. Actually your ally will have to kill most of the baddies for the first half of the level, because there are almost no weapons and ammo on this map, which I’m guessing was a deliberate choice to force the player to stick with their ally. Unfortunately, the execution of this was flawed. There are hostile Bobs scattered across the level as a common enemy, and if (when) one of them damages the UESC marine, the marine will inexplicably start shooting at you!

This is a Marathon 1 campaign, so there is no ambient sound. For some reason the dev chose to include no music, either, so many of the levels seemed strangely quiet. There are new sounds for the weapons, enemies, and platforms, but the new enemy sounds were horrible, loud, ear-splitting shrieks that made me want to turn off the sound altogether! Many of the Pfhor enemies enemies had new color palettes and were tougher than their original counterparts, though the hardest part about the combat in this scenario was the lack of save terminals and shield rechargers.

Overall, it’s difficult to recommend this campaign in its current state. In order for it to be playable, the inter-level teleport crashes would need to be fixed. Also, because the level design and progression were super confusing, there needs to be either a hint guide, spoiler guide, in-game terminal explanation, or something similar so the player isn’t constantly lost. If this happens I will re-visit this review.