If Portal and Mad Max had a baby, it would be gritty, mean, and exceptionally intelligent. Meet Your Maker is the kind of oddity that is hard to label at first but slowly grows on you, up to a point where you feel this urge to pause the game, stand up, and heartily applaud. Behaviour Interactive took some brave risks in this pot-pourri of genres and distinctly succeeded, delivering a bold, wickedly original, and fiendishly devilish game about raiding other players’ outposts in an asynchronous gameplay style, while copiously sweating as you navigate the deadly claustrophobic corridors.
The Cake Is Alright
The accomplished post-apocalyptic atmosphere in Meet Your Maker is gloomy and desperate, as you try to feed the living experiment Chimera in a bid to save life on Earth, or what’s left of it. For that, you will need the most valuable resource available, Genetic Material, or GenMat, your goal as you raid each outpost and escape… or die trying.
Meet Your Maker effortlessly blends elements of tower-defense, puzzle, first-person shooter, and base-building in a seamless and addictive experience. Much like the Portal series and The Entropy Centre, you are thrust into these fiendish outposts and must overcome various challenges to reach your objective, but the path is a treacherous one. Death looms at every corner, traps blend in with walls, and grotesque guards prevent you from moving unscathed. Grab the GenMat from whatever dark place it may be hiding, and then it’s time to backtrack in an equally dangerous and anxiety-inducing escape, new traps springing elsewhere, to the starting point or the desert surrounding the outpost.
High anxiety would perfectly fit as a hypothetical subtitle for Meet Your Maker. The feeling of exploring the unknown and lethal player creations, frequently escaping death by an inch is truly remarkable, and each successful run is worth celebrating, taking a breather, especially in the ferociously vicious Brutal maps. Treading carefully and perfect aim are key, but your greatest asset is your brain – memorize the layout, where every single trap is sneakily placed, anticipate each spike or explosive, and bite your lip as you lose your bearings and part of your sanity in unexpectedly labyrinthic areas.
Finding the GenMat cannister may be partly down to luck, but your best bet is to pay attention to the Harvester that is working the outpost. This description-defying humanoid’s only purpose is to reach the extractor and bring its contents back to the shipping station at the start. No matter how twisted and grand each outpost may look, there’s always at least one straight path leading to the GenMat, so you can follow the Harvester and learn the whereabouts of your objective. Obviously, with all the deathtraps and monstrous creatures, it’s easier said than done.
Meet Your Maker plays with ammo in a brilliant way, adding another tactical layer to a game that is so incredibly rich when you look beneath the surface. There’s no such thing as ammo caches or countless projectiles at your disposal – your volt lancer and plasma bow, to name a few of the ranged weapons, come with very low ammo capacity. This forces you to retrieve every bolt you shoot, even the ones that are now stuck on a corpse. Pick them back up, something that isn’t always straightforward, but at least each bolt has a tracker that blinks and gives away their location, so keep your eyes peeled.
Before each raid you must explore your hub, where the suspiciously benevolent Chimera rests, waiting for the upgrades at the push of a button. Nearby, you have the five advisors that serve as specializations for various categories: weapons, guards, hardware, suits, and traps. Your incursions out in the wasteland will result in parts and currency that is used to level up the Chimera, but also each advisor, offering temporary boosts, specific items, and perks that will make all the difference. More ammo and shot range, suits that focus on different aspects such as melee combat and speed, new guard types, and the like.
You must carefully plan your loadout, as it cannot be changed after taking your first step. Your volt lancer is a deadly weapon that also doubles as a trap destroyer, but the crossbow is ineffective against traps, although perfectly suited for long-range enemy hits. On the other hand, the latter is puny against armored grunts, which means that you must destroy their armor with a bolt, then use an arrow to puncture the flesh. Or you can go melee happy with your blade if you like to go up close and personal.
A grapple hook will be your tool of choice, turning navigation into a free-form affair that otherwise would fee somewhat limited. You can use it to grab those bolts from out of reach places, or simply to navigate faster across the environments, barely escaping the deadly traps by the skin of your teeth. In terms of enjoyment, it’s a great addition that feels good to have and is very useful.
Little House of Horrors
The other distinguished area of Meet Your Maker is the Build phase. Think Minecraft, but remarkably devious and with a lot more impaling and burning, and you may get the idea. The build tools are incredibly easy to use, allowing you to create a simple outpost in a matter of minutes. So far, the game already sports quite a few visually impressive and vast creations, showing that it can work both as a tool for sly butchering purposes and for jaw-dropping artistic accomplishments. From skulls with functioning teeth – which are nothing but ingeniously placed pistons – to devilish facades or even glass buildings shooting for the sky, there’s quite some diversity to the sights and trap layouts.
Apart from placing blocks and traps in very intuitive methods along with a few action modifiers, there’s a remarkably clever mechanism to the guards. Instead of complex systems tracing point A to B and where they will move between them, you can simply embody a guard and walk around, recording this movement pattern as their patrol. Straightforward, smart, even quite appealing to experiment with.
Your little shrine of death will level up in Prestige according to the amount of GenMat it extracts, even when the game isn’t running, allowing you to expand on the build limitations and add some extra hazards to it. Sometimes the best way to thwart enemy raiders is to turn it into a huge maze, so the more scope you have for distractions, the better. You will be notified when a player is killed, so you can claim the spoils of war. Your outpost’s rating also grows as you add more things into it and make it deadlier, ranging from normal to dangerous and the coveted brutal grade.
After each run, you and other players get to rate an outpost in four different categories: fun, brutal, ingenious, and artistic. These are pretty much self-explanatory, and it’s wonderful to start raking in those votes and watch the kill count climbing, giving you an evil genius vibe that is hard not to be happy about.
Since every outpost is explored in an asynchronous way, this means that as soon as your creation goes live, it will be accessible for other players to raid, and the same happens during the campaign with the concepts of others. You can even add some modifiers to your outpost, such as losing 300 GenMat when players successfully steal from you, but each player killed rewards you with extra 100% GenMat.
Happy Death Day
For all the grippy action and building, there’s something of a worry that could be easily solved and which concerns the destroyed traps and how the resulting textures are somewhat similar to traps in perfect working condition – blown-up contraptions should be better emphasized, with visible smoke and flames coming out from them. That would make us certain that we have dealt with them and the deceiving deaths in the style of “oh, I thought that one was already wrecked.” Unnecessarily as it may seem and easily fixed, this doubt will haunt you occasionally.
Meet Your Maker is the kind of game that makes you raise an eyebrow, wondering just what you got yourself into, but after a couple of hours you are addicted. It’s extremely original and clever, there’s already enough content to burn and it will only grow from here, and the build tools are great, providing everything you need but without pointless overcomplications. You can even raid outposts in co-op mode with a friend, and while that doubles up the fun factor, it’s not even essential as the game is a joy to play alone as well, so don’t make that extra multiplayer bullet point as something to significantly weigh on your decision to get this game.
And get the game you should. Meet Your Maker comes with a compelling gameplay loop of raid-build-upgrade-repeat that always kept me eager for the next few round. Despite my traditional reluctance for anything involving map editors, I was extremely satisfied and even a bit proud of my creation, adding more to it at every opportunity. A great example of how to make a genre mix work, Meet Your Maker is a delicious melting pot, even if I don’t trust the Chimera as far as I can throw it.
Score: 9/10
Pros
- A remarkable genre crossover
- Exciting and anxiety-inducing outpost raiding
- Simple and effective build tools
- Compelling atmosphere, gritty and desperate
- Two-player co-op raiding gameplay
Cons
- Destroyed traps could be better signaled
Meet Your Maker review code was provided by the publisher. It’s currently offered as one of the free games in PlayStation Plus’ April 2023 offerings. You can read MP1st’s review and scoring policy right here.
