A twisted first-person Mario Maker from the Dead by Daylight devs - Meet Your Maker Quick Review

PLAY IT OR SKIP IT?

KEF: Play it, especially if you’re interested in a very strange, singular asynchronous multiplayer experience. Meet Your Maker is such an exceedingly strange game that we decided to tackle this quick review as a duo. Hello, I’m Kef, and I’m joined by my colleague Ian. Together, we’ve spent the past few days shifting between being baffled and being completely charmed by the strange mix of first-person shooting, platforming, and base-building in Meet Your Maker.

Meet Your Maker is a new game from the creators of Dead by Daylight where players design their own desert base full of traps and guards and then raid bases designed by other players. The closest point of comparison I can think of is something like Super Mario Maker, except as a first-person shooter and with levels straight out of the Saw movies.

TIME PLAYED

IAN: Kef and I played about four hours each, with Kef on the PlayStation 5 version of the game and myself playing on PC. Kef focused mainly on raiding and unlocking new gear, while I dipped into the base-building side a bit more. That was enough time for us both to get hooked into Meet Your Maker’s progression loop, which involves feeding genetic material that’s found in raids and generated by outposts to a Chimera—a partially formed being that lives in a bubbling fish tank back at base.

WHAT’S AWESOME

• Smooth movement and controls. KEF: Navigating through the player-created death traps of Meet Your Maker requires some serious agility, but thankfully the controls and mechanics of the game are up to snuff. My character had a generously floaty double jump that allowed me to pull off some ridiculous platforming feats, and though I struggled to get the hang of it, I also enjoyed using the grappling hook to zoom across levels. Add in a great sense of momentum, and dying in these deadly mazes encouraged more of a “just one more run, I can get this” feeling than pure frustration.

• Filling bases with devious traps. IAN: Going into Meet Your Maker for the first time, I did not expect the base-building component to hold my attention for long. But once I’d done a dozen raids or so, my mind was full of ideas, like how I might use a blind corner to hide a dart trap, or ways I might conceal a spear trap to catch a raider on their way back out of my little bunker of doom. Building bases is quick and easy: I always know whether there’s a clear path to the goal, and walls and traps all snap together like Minecraft blocks.

• Deep progression. KEF: Though there are some legitimate criticisms of how Meet Your Maker handles earning new abilities—Ian covers those later in this review—I was pulled in by the game’s overall sense of progression. In particular, it succeeded at always making me feel like I was just one or two good heists away from leveling up one of my five advisors or being able to purchase a new toy. Those five advisors focus on different aspects of the game—there’s one for weapons, guards, traps, suits, and “hardware” (i.e. grenades, shields, and so on)—which meant I had some freedom to tailor my experience to my own preferences by choosing raids that buffed up specific advisors. It’s a clever system, and one that has potential to keep me returning to the game over a much longer stretch of time.

• A highly satisfying feedback loop. IAN: I logged in one morning after having my outpost running overnight and saw that I’d killed 202 raiders. To my complete surprise, I was thrilled. Meet Your Maker actually let me watch replays of as many of these kills as I could stand, which was quite a few. I also visited the outpost personally, where a marker floated above the location of each and every player death (along with some useful resources to pick up). This feedback loop provides two important things: First, there’s the mustache-twirling glee of seeing my devious contraptions work as intended, and second, the clusters of death markers work as the kind of spatial data that game developers use to identify issues with level design. Armed with that, I could make on-the-fly iterations to my design and trap even more raiders.

• Totally optional punishment. KEF: As someone who’s not the best at creating my own levels in games, my biggest concern going into Meet Your Maker was how much I stood to lose when other players successfully raided my base. Thankfully, the devs at Behaviour Interactive came up with a surprisingly elegant solution: You don’t have to lose anything! While Meet Your Maker is a multiplayer game, and you are trying to kill enemies who invade your base, it’s not actually competitive in a zero-sum sense. No matter how many times you die while raiding a base, and no matter how many enemies successfully raid your base, both sides of the equation only stand to gain progression and materials. And if you really want a greater sense of risk, you can turn on Overdrive mode, where resources can actually be lost from successful raids on your base, but it’s totally optional.

WHAT SUCKS

• Confusing number of meters and currencies to track. IAN: Meet Your Maker is primarily organized around collecting genetic material, or GenMat, but there’s an overabundance of additional materials to collect and use as well. I had to keep track of how much I’d leveled up my Chimera, as well as each individual advisor at my base, and my outposts had meters and currencies filling up as well. It wasn’t quite clear what each of these does, and the sheer number of meters and stockpiles felt overly clunky and unwieldy.

• A dated, grubby visual style. IAN: Your mileage may vary here, of course, but I wasn’t thrilled by the grungy, desert-mutant aesthetic in Meet Your Maker. It’s not that it’s poorly done—more that it feels very old and drab. Games have gotten much more vibrant and lush-looking in recent years, and Meet Your Maker looks like a throwback to the days of Quake and Quake 2.

• Lack of biomes. KEF: The post-launch roadmap for Meet Your Maker has a major content update coming in June that includes a new environment that will be free to all players. Hopefully there are a lot more of them coming, because one of the biggest problems with the game at launch is that everything looks so samey. As devious and entertaining as the player-created bases can be, they all use the same exact grimy industrial look, which can get a bit boring to witness over and over again.

💬 Are you ready to put together some evil traps in Meet Your Maker, or will you be skipping this unique multiplayer experience? Share your thoughts below!