Meet Your Maker is a unique title from developer Behaviour Interactive that has players building and raiding outposts in order to preserve and acquire materials necessary to survive on a dying world. What makes these outposts special is that each one is built by other players and are specifically designed to kill in a variety of sadistic ways. The concept feels novel and the execution is mostly successful, but there is a significant bias towards builders that often makes raiding outposts feel like a losing battle rather than a challenging one.
Like the sepia-toned wasteland of Fallout: New Vegas and other apocalyptic games, the world of Meet Your Maker is a bleak one filled with yellow skies, vast deserts, and numerous biological mutations and abominations. In this world, players take on the role of a Custodian, who are the agile and deadly raiders that serve the Chimeras: living experiments deemed to be Earth's last resort to preserve life. Achieving this goal requires a large amount of Genetic Material (GenMat), the rarest material on the planet. Due to its rarity and importance, it's hoarded in the outposts of other Custodians and Chimeras; so it's up to the player to steal it.
This requires making it out of these maze-like death traps alive, of course. To do so, players have a small but versatile arsenal comprised of a primary weapon, secondary melee weapon, grenades, utility items, and a grappling hook. Primary weapons stand out here thanks to their risk/reward system, as they are essential for taking out traps and enemies from a distance, but ammo is very limited and can only be refilled by collecting what was fired. While good in concept, the success of this system relies on the mercy of other players.
The heart of Meet Your Maker is a robust building system akin to the Halo series' Forge Mode; though it's more apt to compare it to the likes of Super Mario Maker. This is because both games are among the easiest games to die in and the level of fairness present in each level is reliant on trusting other players to make success possible. When that trust is honored, Meet Your Maker is incredibly fun and rewarding. Unfortunately, mechanics that make building and playing so fun and unique are also incredibly easy to take advantage of and make an outpost nearly impossible to beat.
This can be achieved with the starting traps such as spike traps, arrow traps, and bomb traps, as they are affordable, strong, and hard to detect. For example, the opening room of an early level was filled with these traps, as well as two enemy guards. Dispatching the guards was no issue, but the only way to move forward was to go over a suspicious incline and around a U-shaped corridor. The top of the incline was a spike trap, above that was a bomb trap, and the decline had another bomb trap which, in combination with the short hallway and flat wall at the bend, leaves the player with no time or room to escape the explosions. While overcoming these outposts is often a process of trial and error, there are some that are simply undoable and that realization comes at the expense of player enjoyment.
While these were the minority of outposts, they highlighted just how limited the Custodians are compared to the builders. While players will unlock more resources to get better weapons, utility items, suits, and upgrades for their Custodian, only so much can be done to combat and overcome outposts built in bad faith. There's a fair bit of balancing needed for this game, which will likely happen during the three-month post-launch roadmap, but the potential of Meet Your Maker is clear as day. The versatility of building, the built-in social systems, and the fluid movement mechanics already present is enough to recommend this title, and it's likely that the experience will only improve from here.
Source: PlayStation/YouTube
Meet Your Maker is available now for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. Screen Rant was provided a Steam download code for the purpose of this review.