There’s something rather moreish about Meet Your Maker’s blend of building and raiding. One part Super Mario Maker, one part first person shooter and platformer, your search for GenMat to feed the Chimera will have you diving into and creating all manner of deviously devised death traps.
You’ll step into each level with a pair of basic weapons, a grappling hook and maybe a small supply of items to use as well. By default, it’s a sword and a two-shot electric dart gun that can destroy traps from range, but has a huge amount of bullet drop restricting your range, and a need to reclaim your ammo. This combo can tackle many situations, but there’s also merits to taking the ten-shot crossbow when facing a level with a lot of guards, even though it can’t destroy traps, and there’s also a shield generator and a sword that has a longer lunge.
You’ll need to have your wits about you (and pay attention to the directional danger indicator that flares on your screen) when raiding, because a single hit from a bolt trap, an enemy-fired explosive, or dropping into a corrosive orange glowing block with kill you and send you back to the start to try again. You can also play in co-op, increasing your chances of success.
My personal approach is slow and methodical, using angles and corners to get through, but there’s a high skill ceiling with the use of the grappling hook that I’ve seen others use to zip around larger areas and toy with the reaction times and detection ranges of the many one-shot traps and dim-witted mutant guards. Even the most overwhelming seeming level can be overcome.
With a handful of raids under your belt, the other side of the game gradually opens up to you, with the resources earned letting you buy an Outpost that you can build your own murderous maze within. You’re not starting with a completely blank slate, the levels coming with a predefined GenMat objective point and a mixture of both permanent and removable blocks already.
Creation is like a supersized Minecraft with uniformly sized blocks that you can easily slot together, with sloped halves and quarters also an option. Creating the structure of your level is completely open to you from the off, the only limit being that a hunched delivery drone is able to successfully make their way from start to finish and back again, but you are initially very limited to just a few of the traps and guard types within the game. The rest you have to unlock through play, and then augment with upgrades.
Meet Your Maker is great at providing you ways to see how to improve your Outposts. Firstly, you can very easily switch to playing your level and seeing what works from the ground view, check lines of sight and more, but the real test is when other people play it. You can load up replays from a library of recent attempts to see exactly the approach that other players took, but perhaps more telling is opening up the level builder and finding the tokens left behind by fallen players, each stating what it was that killed them. This shows you the hot zones that work and the places that simply aren’t doing the trick. I thought I’d created a canny diversionary room, for example, but in the end nobody was fooled by the split path, so I quickly made a change to a single path through that quickly had more success.
My main issue with Meet Your Maker is the grind that’s required to enjoy this more creative side of the game and the shackles put upon you. You have to buy outposts one at a time, each one with a distinct size, unchangeable GenMat placement, and limit on what you can spend, and that’s fine for a creative restraint. However, once you’re happy with your level and want to make it public, you can only do so for a limited amount of time before your level is delisted from public view and you need to spend resources once again to ‘prestige’ it and be able to open it up to other players.
That resource is also one of the three needed to buy upgrades, to acquire the traps and guards, the various ability buffs, suit upgrades and more. When you’re already limited to only having five levels that can be public at a time, it’s doubly daft to restrict players from simply loading up the level builder and creating. And even once you are happy with a level, you have to load into the builder again in order to collect resources dropped by players and to prestige it to make it live again. It’s a somewhat slight, but grating bit of friction to the process.
I’ve also felt there’s diminishing returns to the number of players actually being served my creations, with the game always providing five levels each in the lower, middle and higher difficulty tiers. With fewer players, it’s trickier to see what’s needed to improve your creation. And with those returns starting to diminish, and an overarching progression that does little to excite outside of seeing numbers get a bit bigger, that desire to play will fade as well. The game will have had a good boost from launching day one as a PlayStation Plus’ monthly game, but we’ll have to wait and see if it can hold onto them.
