REVIEW - Meet Your Maker revels in creativity and intentional misery
Spikey hazard.
By Jonathan Garrett
05/04/23
Reviewed on PS5.
Played via a PlayStation Plus digital copy.
By taking a simplicity of approach to user generated content, and through a genuinely intuitive level designer, Meet Your Maker eliminates the frustrations often found in games of this type by lowering the barrier of entry. After a well scaffolded and focused series of tutorials, you’re essentially left to your own mischievous devices. The block based level editor, responsive object snapping, and common sense controls then coalesce to form an accessible canvas from which nefarious designs will inevitably emerge.
The premise is equally streamlined; it’s a pacey FPS where you invade player made bases to steal vital materials that lead to various upgrades, or construct your own labyrinth of death and share it with the community. Two player co-op for both building and raiding is available, you can filter by difficulty, augment your abilities with numerous tweaks and fresh equipment, and cross play is thrown in for good measure. Outside of those introductory moments, every run you make is another level designed by a human, which helps encourage return trips as things get brutal quite quickly.
Whether it’s a well placed trap or an A.I. nailing a lucky shot (I’m not bitter), health is at a premium in Meet Your Maker, and a single shot is enough to take you out. Fortunately, respawning is quick, and it was quite telling that failure led to me wanting to try again rather than hard brexit on the whole thing. In fact, death is a necessary evil and a mechanic designed to give you the benefit of hindsight; you learn from your mistakes as you ascertain the choke points of a particular map and then trial and error some potential solutions.
As a gameplay loop, it’s quite addicting, and will ultimately inform some of the decisions you make when designing your own boxes of doom. Aesthetically, however, it’s quite dull, with a blandness that might fit the post apocalyptic premise, but wears thin particularly when textures lack much variation. You can spice things up a bit with simple decals and colour changes, and there is clearly room for expansion here, but the launch offering is still quite limited in this regard. Load times also lack optimisation even on next gen hardware.
That being said, conceptually and in execution, Meet Your Maker delivers a unique experience that turned out to be quite the surprise.
Save the world with spikey traps.
WORTH IT?
At the bottom of every game review, we ask the question: Worth it? And the answer is either “Yeah!” or “Nah”, followed by a comment that sums up how we feel. In order to provide more information, we also have “And” or “But”, which follows up our rating with further clarification, additional context for a game we love, or perhaps a redeeming quality for a game we didn’t like.
YEAH!
Meet Your Maker is a well designed take on user generated content, and will keep you coming back for more.
BUT
The visual palette lacks variation, especially when designing your own levels.
TARPS?
At the bottom of some of our articles, you’ll see a series of absurd looking images (with equally stupid, in joke laden names). These are the TARP badges, which represent our ‘Totally Accurate Rating Platform’. They allow us to identify specific things, recognise positive or negative aspects of a games design, and generally indulge our consistent silliness with some visual tomfoolery.
