Meet Your Maker Review in Progress – Building a Better Deathtrap

Behaviour Interactive is one of the few developers that really gets how to run a live service. The Montreal-based studio has done a remarkable job of keeping Dead by Daylight alive and kicking with a steady drumbeat of compelling content, so their new live-service Meet Your Maker naturally comes with a lot of expectations attached.

Rather than another asymmetric horror game, Meet Your Maker is all about building and raiding, as players create their own dungeon-like Outposts and try to steal the goodies from the Outposts of others. Is this sci-fi experiment destined to become another long-term hit for Behaviour Interactive? Or has a move away from the horror genre dulled their usual deadly precision?

Meet Your Maker casts players as an unnamed “Custodian” for a Chimera – a strange fetus-like creature that subsists on Pure Genetic Material (or “GenMat”), which, for some reason, is sucked from the ground in the world the game takes place in. While Meet Your Maker actually contains some rather detailed logs detailing the lore of its world, don’t go into the game expecting any sort of real narrative. Your goal is to collect GenMat by establishing extraction Outposts or stealing it from others. End of story.

With its big guns, mutant enemies, and blocky Outposts, Meet Your Maker certainly resembles first-person shooters of yesteryear, but looks can be deceiving. While the game’s basic controls and movement bring to mind an id Software game – players move around at a brisk pace and can double-jump and deploy a grappling hook to get around – you’ll quickly realize this isn’t exactly Quake. Your character dies from a single hit and your starting gun has an ammo capacity of two. No, not two clips of ammo, two shots, total. Your gun’s range is also pathetic, with your shots often plopping to the ground like a wad of wet toilet paper well short of whatever enemy you’re aiming at. You’ll increase your abilities as you play, but this game is never going to become Doom Eternal.

Most of the Outposts you’ll encounter (or at least most of those I tackled pre-launch) are relatively small, with a focus on troll-ish trap placement rather than intense gunplay. These short, tricky, replayable challenges seem to be what the game’s mechanics are building tools were mainly designed for. Really, most of the Outposts I took on felt like they had more in common with a Mario Maker speedrun than a classic Doom or Quake level. Granted, there are folks making Outposts that are larger or more combat-focused, but they felt like a poor match for how the game actually plays. You can make a classic Quake-style level in Meet Your Maker, but most of them just aren’t going to be very fun to play.

Thankfully, when Outposts didn’t try to get too ambitious, I found dying and retrying (and retrying and retrying) in order to figure out their tricksy traps fairly satisfying. Okay, sure, I also did my fair share of cursing, but that’s part of the fun. You can also breathe a sigh of relief – this isn’t a roguelike. There isn’t really any punishment for dying at all, as you get to keep all the XP and resources you earn during each failed run, so you can keep retrying without that extra layer of frustration.

On the other side of the Meet Your Maker coin, you have the building, which is fairly versatile but comes with its own caveats and limitations. You don’t build your Outposts entirely from scratch but rather purchase various “Burial Sites” that already have half-finished structures that you can’t entirely remove. There’s something to be said for providing a foundation for people to build upon, but it seems like most people largely ignore these pre-existing blocks, simply building their Outposts on top of them.

Rather than providing an editor that offers a free and full overview of your creation, you actually have to move around the Outpost to place blocks (thankfully, you can at least fly while in building mode). You could argue this gives you more of a sense of how it feels to explore your Outpost as you’re building it, but placing blocks is often awkward and it’s easy to get lost in your own half-finished creation.

Additionally, in order to upload your Outpost for others to play, you must provide a clear path for your robot Harvester to get to the GenMat supply. Harvesters don’t set off traps, but they can’t jump or navigate complex terrain, which means there always has to be a relatively simple route to the GenMat. While you’re free to include side paths and shortcuts, you can’t make an Outpost that requires the player to figure out a complex route or do any platforming. I get the intent behind the Harvester, but I feel like you should also be able to verify your Outpost simply by completing it yourself, ala Mario Maker.

Successfully completing raids and passively offing other players with your Outposts will earn you XP and various resources. Things you can level up include your individual Custodian, the vendors back at your Sanctuary, all your gear, and the Chimera. You also have an overall Tribute level, can progress the Raid map, and earn seasonal Rank Points and Prestige levels for each individual Outpost you build. Phew! It’s enough to make your head spin. At least none of this grinding seems to be designed specifically to push additional spending. New items and cosmetics, most of which will be earnable via gameplay, but will also be available for purchase, have been promised for the future. That said, Meet Your Maker doesn’t have a battle pass, loot boxes, or a garish in-game cash shop like most games of this sort.

What wasn’t entirely clear as I waded through all these progression systems is what the overall point of it all was. I understand what Behaviour’s goal is – keep people playing and unlocking new Meet Your Maker content indefinitely – but most live services give you some overarching goal, or series of goals, beyond “keep on grinding.” Like, what’s going to happen if I keep feeding this weird mutant fetus in a tube with mystery genetic material? I don’t think it’s an unfair question to ask!

Now, it needs to be said that everything I’ve written here is based on pre-launch testing, with Outposts seemingly provided by other reviewers/testers and Behaviour themselves. Obviously, Meet Your Maker is a game that’s going to live and die based on how the community at large responds to its building tools. I also didn’t get much chance to test out the game’s co-op features. For those reasons, I won’t assign a score to this review just yet.

At this point, I can say Meet Your Maker’s raids provided decent tooth-gritting satisfaction, and building my own Outpost deathtraps was simple, devious fun. I’m just not sure if Meet Your Maker’s building tools have the necessary versatility to give the game long-term legs, particularly when combined with limiting mechanics that make more elaborate Outposts a chore to complete. I hope to be surprised, but if the game can’t attract a dedicated community of talented creators, Meet Your Maker may find itself at the pearly gates before too long.

This review was based on a PS5 copy of Meet Your Maker from publisher Behaviour Interactive.