Broken -
10/13/02
And now we come to the last of the Marathon games. If you read any of my last two reviews you may have noticed a total lack of objectiveness. I tend to do that with older "classic" games. I've noticed a lot of people do. But I'll stop that after this review when I start doing some newer games. Actually, I'll stop now, because this game does have some flaws worth mentioning.
Graphics, sound, and gameplay are pretty similar to Marathon 2. There's one new weapon, some new variations of old enemies, and of course, new levels. But the jump from Marathon 2 to Infinity isn't as big as the jump from 1 to 2.
The game does break away from it's predecessors in one way however, and that's in it's story. This game has you jumping through various timelines, communicating with computers who talk to you through cryptic poetry, and takes you through several "dream" levels. I won't go into too much detail, but I will say that it has a very different feel from the last two games. I personally think it's the most interesting out of the three games, but it can also be pretty tough to follow at times.
Overall, the single player game has a good story but it's pretty much just more of the same as far as gameplay goes. Network play is just as good as it ever was (probably).
Although the main attraction of Marathon Infinity really isn't the game at all. It's the two editing tools that come with the game: Forge and Anvil. Forge is the map making tool that Bungie used to create the levels for all three Marathon games. It's actually surprisingly easy to learn. They include some movie tutorials that you can watch, and once you're done with those, they have several more tutorials included in the manual that basically just cover the same topics the movies covered in more detail. They do a good job of introducing you to the features of Forge and teaching you what you need to know to make a map.
Anvil lets you edit physics, shapes, and sounds. I never really used it very much, but it sounds like you can use it to change pretty much anything. So yeah, it's good too.
And that's pretty much it. They never ported Infinity to PC, but if you're a Mac user, I think Bungie still sells the Action Sack on their online store. The game itself really isn't as solid as the last two, but it's still worth playing. And with the editing tools, I'd say it's worth the $10 it costs to get it (and the 5 other games the sack comes with).
