Meet Your Maker Review (PS5)- The creators of the highly successful multiplayer title Dead By Daylight go back to the well with a very different kind of social experience.
Discover if Behavior Interactive has struck gold a second time in PlayStation Universe’s Meet Your Maker Review for PS5.
Meet Your Maker Review (PS5) – Behavior Creates Beauty in the Wasteland
Meet Your Maker seeks to solve the online community conundrum that plagues Behavior’s biggest hit Dead By Daylight. It’d be fairly astute to say this feels very much like a game born from the constricting nature of Behavior’s asymmetrical multiplayer titan.
Both games have simple concepts with clear goals, but Meet Your Maker isn’t as bogged down in the minutiae of people being utter gits to each other online. No, it’s much broader in that regard.
The premise of Meet Your Maker sees the Earth in post-apocalyptic chaos (that is a tad Quake 2-flavored this time) and you are the custodian of the Chimera, a being designed to save the planet before it reaches its full death-rattling, clog-popping finale.
The only way this can happen is if you can feed it a substance known as GenMat by processing it through five groups via your outposts. The good news is there’s plenty of GenMat out in the wastes. The bad news is you’re not the only one after it.
Every player in Meet Your Maker is out there searching for more GenMat, and it can always be found in outposts. Each outpost is created by players as well.
Rather than have each player manually protect their outpost, the whole thing is automated. So, no player fights another in Meet Your Maker. The challenge essentially goes two ways.
Liking Raiders
Raiding is crucial. You have to do some raiding if you want to get anywhere in Meet Your Maker. This is achieved by selecting an outpost from a small handful of tiered options (the bigger and more complex the outpost, the greater the challenge will be).
You enter with one ranged and one melee weapon, plus a grappling hook and a consumable tool or two. The objective is to get to the center of the outpost, steal the Genmat, and get back out again.
An adorable little freak with a box on its back scuttles from the entrance to the site of the Genmat to harvest that and you can follow it to the source. The journey is never easy however as it will be littered with traps, aggressive sub-clone monstrosities, and hopefully, some fiendish level design.
The greatest quality of Meet Your Maker is in challenging the unknown. As every outpost has been designed by another player, there’s an unpredictability normally afforded to games by procedural generation, but with a more human element of deviousness and shithousing going into their design.
You get a little thumbnail of what an outpost looks like before choosing to raid it, and this is where the mind games begin. Outposts that look oddly barren and small can hide a horrific maze of death under the surface.
Whereas an intimidatingly designed monolith of an outpost puts across the idea it will be tough from the outset. It’s early days, but already there are fine examples of misdirection from players.
Anyone familiar with the sadistic side of Mario Maker games will be familiar with the kind of evil genius shenanigans players can cook up. Meet Your Maker is all about bringing the pain and seeing if you’re good enough to create or conquer it.
Quake Your Money Maker
But first, you need to earn the right to create an outpost, and the bigger it is, the more it’ll cost you. The least straightforward aspect of Meet Your Maker comes in the form of its multiple ‘currencies’.
Some pay for Outpost upgrades and construction. Others are for player-based enhancements such as armor and weaponry. It’s rather overwhelming at first, even if Behavior tries its best to ease the player into things.
Thankfully, there’s a variety of ways you can earn these currencies so you’ll soon be earning enough to better yourself and your outposts.
Outposts only stay active for a set amount of time, so once it has harvested the GenMat, you’ll need to reactivate it for an in-game cost. If you want to yield more GenMat from it, you can prestige the outpost.
This gives you more room to lay down extra traps and grunts, but also ups the GenMat you can gain from the site. The consequence is that the time the outpost is active will shorten and the price of reactivation will go up. But if you’ve got a fairly successful killbox going, it’s worth the gamble for all the extra goodies it brings.
Personally, playing the outposts of other players nearly always left me inspired to replicate the tricks I’d seen in them with my own. A cycle of determination and appreciation occurred where I had to beat difficult outposts to essentially ‘unlock’ what made them work. The beautiful thing about this is that neither the player’s life nor the other player’s GenMat is really at risk.
Givers in the Desert
If you die, you just go back to the entrance and try again, but the player that owns the outpost will gain reputation and material reward for each failure that occurs in their walls. If the raiding player steals the GenMat successfully, it won’t deplete the outpost owner’s actual GenMat supply.
By taking away severe consequences for failure, Behavior has provided a greater focus on one-upmanship and ingenuity. I’m hopeful this will lead to a more playful and creative community in the long run.
I’ll be fascinated to see how Behavior’s Chimera evolves in the coming months and years. Player-led games can be extremely difficult to keep fresh and interesting, but if the core gameplay loop is there, then there’s a good chance of longevity. I certainly want Meet Your Maker to succeed because it’s such a refreshing experience.
Even as I finish writing this review, I’m itching to go check out how many poor souls my outpost has slain overnight. I’m as enthralled by the game’s promise of more power and freedom as the Custodian is of its Chimeras.
Meet Your Maker is now available on PS5 and PS4.
Review code kindly provided by publisher.