In Meet Your Maker, each death is a valuable lesson. Just not in the way you might expect.
Meet Your Maker is a game of two halves. Set in a post-apocalyptic future you begin by blasting, jumping and swinging your way through a range of trap-laden, player-created outposts. But once you’ve gathered enough resources you get to craft your own which, in turn, other players will raid (solo or in pairs if you’re playing co-op). Think Mario Maker meets Mad Max.
This leads to a weird love/hate relationship with death. You’ll hate that whoever created the level you’re exploring managed to hoodwink you into getting skewered. You’ll curse the deviousness trap that annihilated you, or you’ll curse yourself for wasting your ammo on triggering traps when there was a mutant behemoth lurking around the corner.
But, on some level, you’ll also relish each demise. Why? Because you’re rubbing your hands at the prospect of employing that same trick in your own outpost. Or, if you’re feeling really creative, you might think how to take it to the next level. Bouncing bombs and a 45% incline? Let’s see what happens when a throw a giant metal claw in there.
Related: Tips For Raiding Outposts in Meet Your Maker
Sure, there’s no guarantee that the player whose trap you blundered into will visit your outpost. But that won’t stop you from poring over your replays, hoping against hope that Billy or Belinda Bouncing Bombs has met their demise in one of your bases. Not that we hold grudges. Honest.
And that’s Meet Your Maker. No, we’ve not skipped the bit where you wander the wasteland, Fallout-style, solving other people problems. That’s all there is to it. Raid outposts, use the resources you gather to build and upgrade your own. That’s the whole game right there. And yet, we’ve found it to be utterly, utterly engrossing.
Okay, maybe Resident Evil 4 has had a little look-in, but Meet Your Maker has dominated our week. It helps that the game (which requires an always-on connection) reminds you exactly how successful – or otherwise – you’ve been in dispatching raiders.
Meet Your Maker’s first-person level editor is ridiculously easy to use but that’s not the best thing about it. No, what’ll have you grinning is the skull icons it scatters around, each marking the demise of a raider. We defy you not to belt out an evil laugh as you’re pocketing the resources the fallen have left.
And we absolutely cannot understate the drive to make your outpost bigger, better and more lethal. Meet Your Maker isn’t a puzzle game in the conventional sense but you’ll exhaust your brain trying to devise a trap that the next raider won’t see coming.
There’s a degree of psychology involved, too, making people think they’re in the clear then dispatching them in an unexpected manner. We’ve even found ourselves running and rerunning these little supervillain scenarios in our head. We’ve had fun just thinking about playing Meet Your Maker, which is really something.
Meet Your Maker isn’t perfect. It matches with the whole post-apocalyptic vibe but, initially, we were disappointed that you have to build around existing structures. It goes with the post-apocalyptic vibe but you can’t take a flat, pristine piece of land and start there.
The always-online requirement could be handled a little better, too. Meet Your Maker wouldn’t be half as much fun if you weren’t challenging and being challenged by other players. But if your connection cuts out mid-game and doesn’t reconnect in under a minute or so, the game kicks you back to the title screen.
The game is the work of Behaviour Interactive, the company behind Dead by Daylight. That’s been running for five years and we hope Meet Your Maker will last that long, too. But we’d definitely have appreciated the ability to download and play levels offline. If your internet connection is unreliable then you might want to give Meet Your Maker a miss.
If you’ve got a creative streak and a taste for vengeance, Meet Your Maker will have you cackling, plotting and cursing well into the night. You’ll shun daylight, surrounded by an ever-growing field of 3D printed skulls, each representing in in-game kill. And at the end of the day, isn’t that what gaming’s all about?
Meet Your Maker Review – GameSpew’s Score
