Who hasn’t dreamed of being like Indiana Jones or Lara Croft at some point, delving into elaborately designed dungeons, evading traps and enemies to grab the treasure that lies within? While that’s a pretty common fantasy, there’s also those who’d love to be the person designing those intricate deathtraps, but until now, there hasn’t really been a game that allows players to experience both sides of that idea.
Enter Meet Your Maker, which sees players taking on the role of a Custodian. Far from cleaning up toilets, you’re instead tasked with looking after a Chimera, a weird blob thing floating in a jar who is trying to synthesise a cure to a rather nasty disease that’s rendered the Earth inhospitable. In order to do that, you’ll need genetic material, and you’ll be pulling double duty in your pursuit of it, leading to a fun experience on both sides of the coin. Quite how long this fun will last is yet to be determined, though.
Meet Your Maker allows players to create their own outposts, filled with a manner of traps, guards and other potential hazards, before going off to raid outposts created by others, earning genetic material and rewards for doing so. While you’re away raiding outposts, or even while you’re offline, other players can attempt to raid your outpost themselves, with any death caused in your outpost netting you even more rewards.
It’s an intriguing system, and one that always makes you feel like you’re working towards and earning something, especially when you’re not playing. Logging on and seeing how many players have fallen to your impeccably placed defences is often just as satisfying as escaping from an incredibly difficult outpost, while viewing the replays of those failed attempts can lead to ideas on how to better improve the outpost even further.
A good example in my own outpost was how some players seemed to get distracted before locating the entrance, which wasn’t immediately in front of players when they spawned, leading me to leave decals on the floor guiding players to their proper destination. Admittedly, that might be just a small bit of feedback to receive, but being able to see which parts of your outpost are working correctly while others aren’t is going to be what takes the creation in Meet Your Maker to the next level.
In even better news, creating your own outposts is incredibly simple, even on console, meaning that new levels won’t just be coming from PC players who have the time and energy to devote to something like this. From ideas to execution, making a full-sized outpost on PS5 only takes about two hours, maximum, and you can always save and come back before publishing your outpost to the whole world. The fact that players don’t need a mouse and keyboard to create something special should be what pushes players to try the building half of Meet Your Maker, even if they’re only really interested in the shooting side of things.
The raiding mode is also interesting, as Meet Your Maker plays almost like a boomer shooter. The way you move and the cubic level design gives the whole game a distinctly retro feel, but more modern features like the ability to lean around corners and use a grapple hook help spice up the affair. You’d expect a grapple hook to up the pace of Meet Your Maker massively, but you’ll often have more success taking things slow and considerate.
The amount of traps that’ll catch you off-guard from blind spots kind of requires a steady pace anyway, while grappling around the map often leads you into more trouble, especially in some of the more devious outposts. Still, the grapple hook makes for an excellent escape tool, or a way to close some distance on some pesky enemies.
Perhaps less satisfying are the weapons themselves. There are only five of them, with two of them just being single-shot crossbows, while two others are swords. The only difference between them is how effective they are against flesh, armour and traps, but aside from that, they’re basically just the same thing. The slow, deliberate gameplay of Meet Your Maker might not be so unique if people were running around outposts with an AK-47, but some variety is definitely needed.
This lack of variation also extends to the rest of the game, with only two suits available at the time of launch, four outpost guards and nine trap types. At the minute, there’s only one biome too, Sure, there’s the ability to upgrade your weapons and suits, and purchase mods for guards and traps to be used in the outposts, but it still feels like Meet Your Maker is somewhat of an early access launch instead of a full release. Behaviour Interactive have promised more content coming in the future with new items and other tools for players to stick their teeth into, but whether enough players will stick around to see that content remains to be seen.
It’s not that Meet Your Maker isn’t a good game, because there’s definitely room on the market for an asymmetrical multiplayer game that doesn’t force players to actively compete against each other. Meet Your Maker pits one player’s skill and patience against another’s ingenuity (and penchant for sadism), making it one of the more unique multiplayer games on offer. With some updates and new content, hopefully it’ll have a place to stay.
A deluxe edition code for Meet Your Maker was provided by PR for the purposes of this review.
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