Marauders

I want to like Marauders more than the current state of it allows. The concept is genuinely clever: take the extraction shooter formula that Escape From Tarkov made famous, drop it into an alternate-history 1990s where the Great War never ended, and send players into space as scavenging pirates raiding frigates and asteroid installations. The community even nicknamed it 'Starkov' at launch, which tells you exactly what the pitch is. When it clicked, it really clicked. The dieselpunk aesthetic pulls WWII-era weapons like bolt-action rifles and submachine guns into a world of pressurized airlocks and asteroid fields, and that collision of eras produces something with genuine character. Raids on hulking frigates have a tense, methodical rhythm. You dock, you listen for footsteps, you manage your oxygen timer, you fight through both AI enemies and other players hunting the same loot. Dying means losing everything you carried in, and that permanence makes every firefight feel meaningful in a way that sanitized PvP shooters rarely do. The standout layer that separates Marauders from its competitors is the ship system. You and up to three crewmates spawn on a ship out in open space, and before any boots hit the ground there is already a tactical decision about where to fly, who mans the turrets, and whether to try breaching another player's vessel. Ship-to-ship combat adds a Sea of Thieves-style crew dynamic that the extraction genre mostly ignores. In a good session with a full squad it feels like nothing else. The faction contract system gives medium-term goals beyond pure looting, and crafting lets you build out attachments and gear rather than just swapping whatever drops. Here is where honesty becomes uncomfortable. Marauders entered Early Access in October 2022, peaked at around 14,000 concurrent players shortly after launch, and has since collapsed to a handful of active users at any given time. Recent Steam reviews have tilted mostly negative, with community members reporting dead US matchmaking and expressing frustration over a near-two-year communication blackout from the developers. Ship modding, a feature that players cited as a core selling point, was reportedly removed during Early Access and never returned. The bugs that reviewers flagged at launch, including hit registration issues, AI pathfinding failures, and long queue times, were real problems even when the servers were busy. At today's player counts, matchmaking is not a bug, it is a wall. For solo players the situation is particularly grim. The game was never well-suited to solo runs even at peak population; the extraction loop demands either good teammates or the patience to rat through empty corridors hoping to avoid squads. With a skeleton playerbase, solo queues in many regions are functionally unplayable. If you have two or three dedicated friends who are all willing to buy in simultaneously and coordinate sessions, you can still engineer enough of a raid experience to see what made the concept exciting. That is a big if. Marauders is a game I would have pushed hard during its first month. The diesel-and-space aesthetic is done well, the two-layer structure of space combat feeding into ground raids is a genuinely fresh idea for the extraction genre, and the moment-to-moment tension of permadeath loot runs is intact when the servers cooperate. The foundation was solid. The playerbase is not. Buying into an Early Access extraction shooter in 2026 with single-digit concurrent users is a calculated risk, and right now that calculation does not favor new players unless you are walking in with a pre-built crew and realistic expectations.

Alex · Scout Team

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