Meet Your Maker - Before You Buy
Hey, and we're back with another episode of Before You Buy, that show where we give you some straight-up gameplay and our first impressions of the latest games releasing, and today we're taking a quick look at this game called Meet Your Maker. This was just dropped today. It's on Steam and I believe you can get it on PlayStation Plus if you have that, so we figured we'd dive in.
We've been playing on both console and PC, and this video is co-written between myself and Eric Thielenhouse. Now, it's a game with a pretty amazing elevator pitch. Basically what if Super Mario Maker, but first person shooter? It's a really, really good idea from Behavior Interactive. These are the people behind Dead by Daylight, but great ideas don't always translate to great games. One thing we often hear developers talk about is finding the fun. Sure, you get a concept filled with fresh ideas, but actually taking that and making it an entertaining experience for someone to play isn't as easy.
Now, Meet Your Maker kind of falls in the middle. It's like a game that we feel hasn't quite found the fun yet but it's a pretty solid experience in every way. It's just not as over the top fun as the concept really sounds. Like, it feels like a good foundation. Behavior Interactive supports their games very well usually, and I hope this can grow into a bigger thing, because, at the very least, what they're starting to get going here seems like it could be pretty sweet. Now, before we get all into it though, let's talk about what the game is, because it does require a little bit of explanation. Meet Your Maker is an asynchronous, multiplayer first person shooter where you go on these raids against bases that are all built by other people. All the walls, traps, and enemies are all specifically placed to kill you by an actual person who designed the level.
Your goal is to always collect this big red tube at the end, and then double back. Once you grab that tube, new enemies can spawn, new traps can appear and kind of keep you on your toes even more. Now, you got a few tools to help you survive. You start with a melee weapon and a long range weapon that actually kind of sucks. It's short range and it can only fire two shots, which you have to collect the bolts again. You can also craft consumable tools like grenades, speed boosts, and revives, which are limited, but can be helpful in certain raids, and you gotta start leveling up and getting better weapons and just understanding the game, because it only takes one hit to kill you, and you're going to be dying a lot in this game.
One thing we do really appreciate is that there isn't really any punishment for dying here. If you're killed, then you just respawn at the start of a raid and you can try again. Even though there are some hallmarks of an extraction shooter here, like the whole, you know, get in and get out with the loot aspect of it, the game isn't really that brutal. Like, you're free to retry a raid as many times as you want with no penalty.
The only thing you really have to deal with is the fact that the loading times are kind of long on PlayStation 5. But not having any actual penalty is good because some of these level sare, like, ridiculous. The traps some people have put here are just insane, and it can actually be a thrill to slowly kind of peel away at the many layers of traps and finally figure out how to get through a level alive. And of course, like I said, getting to the middle is only half the battle because things change up and you're gonna find yourself very carefully peeking around corners and slowly navigating your way through, basically sweating the whole time.
And it can be pretty good. Structurally, it's like a multiplayer game. You know, you've got multiple skill tracks and currencies that are used to unlock additional equipment, both for raiding and for building outposts, and while there's a bizarre story tying everything together, most of your time in this game will be spent either in the raids or in the base builder. In terms of learning the ropes, it seems like a lot at first.
The game doesn't do a very good job of really slowly teaching you things. It kind of just throws a bunch of text box at you as you're making your way through it, so it seems a little overwhelming at first especially with so many different words and currency types. But once you get through that, it's all relatively simple. Now, between the raiding and the base building, you've got this central hub where you can access your advisors, these, like, special, almost Borg-like people who all provide different benefits.
One makes weapons, one can upgrade your armor, another unlocks traps for your builds, stuff like that. They all have their own individual resource types too, so you can level them up and then get more from them, like better equipment and temporary bonuses, like, say, more drops when you're fighting through a level. And the actual story, for whatever it's worth, it's so strange that it's actually pretty intriguing. You play as this custodian, you're the caretaker of this bizarre, gross creature in a tube called the Chimera.
Those red tubes you're collecting are apparently genetic material, perfect genetics, which you're hunting down to find a cure for mankind from some unknown genetic breakdown disease thing. It's all really weird, but it doesn't actually matter too much to the gameplay. It's all just weird set dressing to give the game a little bit more personality, but I gotta say, I think it works here. It kind of feels like a throwback. This game feels just like PC as hell. I don't know what it is, maybe just, like, with it all feeling kind of like Quake and Strogg, or like I said earlier, the Borg, it's just the right amount of, like, gross bioorganic nerdiness that I really appreciate.
And some of the dialogue is actually cool, like the Chimera in the jar is constantly just kind of talking shit about saving the world and ruling and how you're the only hope, and it's just cool. All of the other people, like those advisor NPC people, all kind of look the same, but it's nice that they all kind of have their own little function. The whole hub base thing just feels way different from when you're out there raiding and fighting. I actually wish some of this feel translated over to the rest of the moment to moment gameplay. Now, in terms of unlockables, there isn't really a lot here at the moment. The game seems like it's constantly throwing rewards at you.
Like I said, text box are popping up when you're first starting, but there's not too much you can actually do with all these currencies, at least right now, and progression is fairly slow. You're gonna have to grind for a little bit to actually get the money to buy your first area to build your own base at. So it's a little slow and I know it's kind of standard for these types of games, but you know, that can bug some people, so we just wanted to mention it. It's not that bad. And when it comes to control, it plays pretty well. Yeah, much better on PC. The PlayStation 5 version took some fine tuning with dead zones and sensitivity, and it took a bit to get right, but on PC, movement feels decent, weapons are responsive, and how each trap works feels fair enough, you know?