We spent several hours in the company of Meet Your Maker, the new title from the creators of Dead By Daylight for PlayStation Plus subscribers.
Meet Your Maker, the new first-person game that can also be played in co-op and developed by Behavior Interactive – a Canadian studio known for example for Dead By Daylight (if you missed it, here’s our review of Dead By Daylight) – is finally available on PC , Xbox consoles, PlayStation and for PlayStation Plus subscribers (here all April games on PlayStation Plus). A title that has particularly amused us thanks to his double soul of shooter and tower defensewhich we hope will be supported for as long as possible by its creators, to keep the community strong and avoid making the mechanics at the base of the playful mixture become repetitive.
We start with raids
We want to make it clear: it took more than ten attempts to pass the first bunker of Meet Your Maker. Having just set foot inside a labyrinthine and claustrophobic structure – each level of the game is designed by a user of the community – we begin to follow a small and harmless robot, the Reaper, which carries the MatGen, the most precious material present inside the Wastelands. To supervise our raids we find the Chimera, a disturbing creature present inside the Sanctuary, the headquarters that also serves as the main hub.
If all goes as we think, by following the Reaper we will reach the point from which the MatGen is extracted and we will run away from the fortress with the important energy source. Of course, our plan didn’t take into account countless contingencies. One foot resting on a slab apparently the same as all the others, and spikes emerge from the ground that cross our entire body, sanctioning the first game over.
In subsequent raids we then decide to move with a watchful eye, be careful, one step at a time, also because the warrior we control has no health points and each blow suffered is mortal. With the rifle that fires a very powerful electric projectile capable of piercing any type of flesh – however with a very short range – we kill the first two ravenous monsters (the variety of creatures at the moment it is not particularly high), including a creepy Hornet, a flying being that fires homing darts.
Later, we move with the grappling hook supplied to a raised point on the map to also eliminate the third enemy hidden in the room. Before continuing in the new area, however, let’s look around. After having died several times from arrows shot from a wall trap, we understood what is the key to survival in Meet Your Maker: in the latest effort by Behavior Interactive it is vitally important to tread carefullysince any movement carried out with excessive superficiality can prove fatal.
We turn our gaze to our right and to our left, then up and down, to try to identify every pitfall devilishly hidden by the builder of the base. Once we reach the heart of the bunker and recover the MatGen, we are ready to flee. We thought we’d gotten away with it once and for all, but instead yet another wave of anxiety overwhelmed usas if we weren’t agitated enough already: from the walls appear other deadly devices that shoot fire and drop explosive grenades, ready to do anything to stop our escape.
The gameplay of Meet Your Maker consists of two closely related phases. The first is raidingin which our goal is to attack one of the various outposts scattered throughout the Wastelands, characterized by a different degree of danger – normal, dangerous and brutal – which varies according to the number of traps and enemies present in the level. The second is instead that of construction in which we will try to build, brick by brick, an impregnable fort that will “send to the creator” any player who tries to violate it. Once we have recovered the MatGen and the raw materials obtained by killing enemies and destroying traps, we return to the Sanctuary to upgrade our equipment (such as the number of darts the rifle can fire) and increase the level of the Chimera and receive other materials in return of development. Precisely with the latter it is possible to buy new devilries such as the crossbow, grenades and defensive gadgets, and just by the team members who accompanied us on expeditions. At the start of the game, our survival kit consists of the standard rifle, whose feeling pad in the hand is convincing, as well as a very useful melee blade that also takes advantage of the adaptive triggers of the PlayStation 5 DualSense. After a few raids , we decided to swap the knife for a portable shield that blocks all types of attacks.
Furthermore, after completing a series of successful looting, a bonus station will appear on the map which will double the loot obtained in the event that our expedition is successful. Regarding the choice of the stronghold to pillage, it is very important to take advantage of each NPC’s unique abilities: the adviser of the suits, for example, has a particular ability, known as Vigilante, which allows, if activated, to see for a short period of time the density of guards and traps present. In addition, and we really appreciated it, it is possible to evaluate the bunker when completed, by selecting one of these four adjectives: funny, brutal, ingenious and artistic.
We continue with the construction
The second point around which the gameplay of Meet Your Maker revolves is the phase in which we raise the defenses of the base. By consuming the materials recovered during the raids, we have to select the traps and the soldiers who will put a spanner in the works of the opponents. Icing on the cake, we will be able to set the patrol route for our men. Building labyrinthine paths delimited by four walls can prove to be a very useful strategy to contain the view of the raiders and in this way prevent the extraction point of the MatGen from being identified too easily.
There are specific elements that manage to provide the right stimuli for building well-defended and increasingly lethal structures for the unfortunate assailants. For example, take a look at other people’s ratings on our fort, or counting the deaths caused by our creations. Last but not least is the recovery of the loot left by those who died by tempting fate. However, one critical element that we have noticed, in addition to the number of selectable defenses still quite smallis the significant imbalance between the use of troops and traps, with the latter currently having a clear advantage and the reason is mainly one: the newfangled things can be hidden and they escape even the most attentive eye and this makes them decidedly more dangerous than monsters (which, moreover, are not moved by who knows what AI). Because of this, when you storm bases you tend to run into a large number of deadly devices and, consequently, in a low amount of creatures to deal with. Once, driven by the desire to approach Meet Your Maker as a pure shooter, we found a structure where the presence of mobs was higher than that of dart-shooting walls.
In other words, Behavior Interactive shall adequately support your game, because only in this way will we have the opportunity to witness increasingly diverse creations by the community. In a raid, for example, we actually recovered the MatGen, not without difficulty. We turned to start the journey backwards and, immediately after raising the camera, the room was filled with at least ten new lethal surprises ready to tear us to shreds. We didn’t get caught up in it despair of having to do it all over again.
We kept our cool and, taking advantage of the grappling hook, passed the first death machines unscathed, fired a shot at the most dangerous trap in front of us while the darts from the side ones passed us a centimeter away, as if to reward the our calm in a tense situation. We breathed a sigh of relief and finally got the MatGen to safety, but not before having made our compliments to the author of the bunker.
On the graphic front, although on the aesthetic one there is not who knows what wide variety, Meet Your Maker does its decent job. For the type of experience and to maximize the pleasure of the action, we have chosen to play it in performance mode at 60 fps, to the detriment of the one devoted to maximizing resolution.
Meet Your MakerPlayStation 5 Analyzed VersionMeet Your Maker is a particularly fun title thanks to the combination of shooting, exploration and construction of the fort. The playful recipe has proved to be fairly varied and never excessively monotonous, although the players’ choices are still rather limited. In other words, insiders will have to continue to support the project so that the community can indulge in creating ever more ingenious bunkers and outposts but, more than anything else, capable of claiming countless victims.
