Meet Your Maker Review – An Inch Wide And A Mile Deep

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Mario Maker meets Doom 3? I have no idea what means, but colour me interested!

After my first play session with Meet Your Maker I thought it might be an early game-of-the-year contender. The gameplay feels good, the atmosphere is brooding and awesome, and the idea of endless FPS levels that feel like Kazio hacks of Doom 3 crossed with Doom (2016) is something I never knew I needed. Hell, the whole thing can even be played with a friend. I try to resist knee-jerk praise as extreme as that, and the longer I played, the more I was reminded why I push down those feelings. As I sunk hours into Meet Your Maker, my enthusiasm diminished until I was left just wishing there was more.

It sounds weird to say that there isn’t much content in a game that focuses on a neverending feed of community-created levels, but it’s true. While the drip feed of levels might be endless, the progression and rewards for playing aren’t.

Meet Your Maker is an awesome idea, but maybe that’s all it is. In a dying world, you are one of the last living beings left (if you can call your techno-organic state life), and it’s your job to raid outposts created by other players for materials, so you can upgrade your loadout, your building equipment, and The Chimera. Oh, and that Chimera is a gross as hell, talking-fetal-organism-thing trapped in an oversized test tube that is probably totally evil. You can then buy plots of land to create your own outposts, that you can fill with your own gross monsters and devilish traps, and every player who dies in your base trying to raid it will generate more materials for you.

The game does a great job at figuring out on the fly just how much of an incompletable nightmare your base is, going off how many traps (and what sort) you have in it, and dividing outposts into three difficulties. This worked great pre-release where even the hardest levels created by the dev team felt beatable with enough time, patience, and deaths. However, it’s hard not to imagine that it won’t encounter the same problem to the first Mario Maker did as soon as players get their hands on it, with the hardest category being home to both difficult-but-doable levels and outposts that may as well be impossible.

The good news is that even in the hardest levels, Meet Your Maker is fun to play. The tools at your disposal in the FPS side of the game are similar to a push-forward-combat shooter like Doom (2016). Even though there’s no sprint button, you move quickly, you have a grappling hook that can pull you through levels, and your melee attack throws you towards enemies and traps you’d think would be out of reach. However, this is all counterbalanced by only having two-to-six bullets in your gun and the fact that any surface could be a trap, forcing you to methodically make your way through every bite-sized level. This means that while you can slowly make your way through an outpost, destroying every trap for extra materials, sometimes your best bet (and the most fun one) is just to run and grapple and hope for the best. This is helped by the fact that there is no punishment for dying, and you can retry as many times as you like.

Meet Your Maker is fueled by player-created levels and thankfully the creation tools for building are intuitive and, more importantly, extremely modular. This is where the game is at its best and provides the most depth. Every trap, from spikes to fire blasters and even claws that will grab you, can all be fitted with two modifications. The most basic of these means that a trap is hidden and won’t deploy until after a raider grabs the gen-mat they are trying to steal, but other modifiers can do things like add extra range to deadly darts or an extra layer of armour to enemies.

This all comes together to make every player-created level feel unique. Even if there are only nine blocks in the game at launch, there are countless ways you can make unseen modifications to them and pair them up with other modified traps to create devious ways to kill other players.

But that is where the wheels start to come off. You can upgrade your suit, weapons, traps, equipment, and even the AI enemies, but why? I know, I know, why do we do anything in games? Once we start to question the question of why we are on any game’s content treadmill things break down, but in Meet Your Maker’s case it really does all feel a little pointless.

Yes, you can upgrade your character, but theoretically, every base is beatable with any combination of the five weapons, and once you find a combo of sword and gun, gun and shield, or shield and sword, why would you ever change your loadout? The game tries to elevate this by giving you Champion Outposts. Basically every six outposts you loot you will be greeted with an outpost that will reward you with extra materials. But these outposts aren’t special, they’re just another user-generated level, you can attempt as many times as you like without punishment. And once you do complete it you just get a few extra materials and do it all over again.

The story doesn’t exist or progress beyond the admittedly cool set-up, instead, you are left just endlessly feeding materials into a hideous tube monster promising you that you’ll be rewarded greatly one day.

Behaviour Interactive has already outlined the beginning of a roadmap of content, and considering this is the team behind Dead By Daylight, the studio will probably deliver on those new characters, traps, and environments. But the problem is it all feels weightless. It’s cool to see new levels created by other players, but it all feels in vain. I would almost rather that there was no progression, and it was just a sandbox for exploring player-created levels. Instead, you are left feeling like you are leveling up for the sake of leveling up, with no real reward or motivation.

Meet Your Maker is a killer concept, but it feels empty despite building up a miserable world I so desperately want to know more about. For as boundless as the content may be, shallow progression makes it all feel disposable and vapid. It might be great in a year’s time, but right now it’s little more than a cool idea.

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