Never ran into an instance where it felt like something killed me when it shouldn't have, so that's a big plus in the game's favor. The rope trap can sometimes feel a little awkward, but it at least gives you enough time to get away before it triggers. It could be a lot worse. Now, ranged weapons and melee attacks have some pretty simple animations though, and not a lot of feedback to them, so while pulling off a shot is totally responsive, it doesn't exactly feel super satisfying or exciting. The same goes with the movement.
There are, like, lean left and right options as well as grappling hook and stuff, but I wish the actual gameplay itself emphasized faster pace and, like, crazy running around. All in all, everything works pretty well. The problem is that it's only, like I said, moderately fun in our opinion. There are a lot of reasons for that, but for us personally, the biggest issue is probably how the building actually fundamentally works. So when you build a base, you have to make it so this little drone guy, this little gross cube man, can walk from the starting area to the end.
The only things this little guy can walk on are flat or sloped surfaces, which severely limits how creative people can actually be with their maps. There's only so much you can do because of this. Every level, at least how it seems now, by nature, it basically has to be a straight line to the end at some point. You know, creative players can kind of work around that somewhat, like this level here that's a pretty complicated maze, but it really only works if you ignore the path of the drone and explore on your own as the player in it.
Another consequence of this rule is that you can't build a level with platforming challenges much at all, forcing people to rely almost entirely on traps and enemies to add difficulty to a level. This is a game where you've got some pretty fun movement powers. Like I said, the jump is pretty, like, forgiving. There's a grappling hook, it's pretty good, but you never really get a chance to go crazy with this stuff. So while this game can look pretty nice at times, especially in that cool home base, when you're actually in the moment to moment stuff, you're in extremely cramped and ugly concrete block structures, filled with mostly, like, the troll bait traps meant to just surprise and kill you.
Now again, the traps themselves aren't BS, but sometimes the placement can be, and it ends up just kind of having a lot of boring, ugly, blocky levels. It makes it feel really old and outdated. And it's worth pointing out that builds reward you for kills, that's the main thing, which encourages players to just create raids that kill as many people as possible, which might be fun to watch, but it isn't that much fun to play. You know, it's kind of like if Mario Maker encouraged players to make those Kaizo maps above everything else, and with a much, much more limited design palette.
So it feels like everybody pulls the same tricks. You know, they hide traps on sloped ceilings and right around corners. They put false floors everywhere and try and crowd you with armored enemies and tight spaces. After playing through a few raids, you'll know what to expect. Bombs on slopes, false walls with rope traps that pull you into damage blocks, dart traps out in the open, hiding a second trap around the corner or above you. The tricks really start to run together and you do feel like you've seen it all.
I will say, every once in a while when a player figures out something a bit different, that is a good shakeup, but most of the time the moment to moment stuff is kind of samey. Maybe it's other people like us, maybe they're just not too creative at the level building yet. It's still the very, very
early days of this game, I just wanna point that out. And the same goes with the enemy types. The enemies look so cool. I think they just have some great designs, but they're pretty dumb and there's only so many of them.
I think that they can go a lot further with this from, obviously, gameplay ramifications, like what they change up your strategy, but also the looks. If they keep going on this bio freak thing, I think it could be pretty sweet. But even with some cool bad guys, it all just starts to get old after a while. It's just a bunch of featureless rooms with spike traps and stuff.
The game gives players all the incentives just to make the raids hard, but not fun, and that's kind of counterintuitive considering after you finish one, the game incentivizes you to then rate it, rate the map, like with how creative it is, how artsy it is, how fun it is, but really, there's not a lot of tools in the maker to make it artistic or make it fun or intriguing, just simple and hard. We just haven't had a lot of intriguing playthroughs yet. Again, it's early, but yeah.
Now, we'll admit, like a lot of the raids are hard, you know, the ones rated brutal are pretty nuts, but in a game like this, we also wanna see cool designs and creativity as much as challenge because that's a significant part of the fun. There are so many create-a-park levels in Tony Hawk that weren't hard, but they were just weird and cool and fun to check out and explore. And with the game at least being smooth playing in the first person shooting, like I want some levels that make me blaze through them or get creative or get a little weird. I'd rather be Titanfalling or, like, Mirror's Edge-ing my way through a level fast-paced instead of just slowly walking through it, turning a corner, getting killed by yet another spike trap and then respawning, and you know, it's fun to figure it out at first, but again, it gets old.
I think really, it needs more objectives, more speed-based objectives, just time objectives. I don't know. Really the biggest complaints just come to that, the reliance on the instant death traps for difficulty and just emphasizing map building just for killing, but we just wish there was more, 'cause the concept is absolutely brilliant. And if this was just a bit more fun to play, with more to do on both ends, both building and incentivizing and then just playing through, it could be pretty tight. The developers do have a roadmap for the next couple of months of updates, but they mostly look like new cosmetic options and equipment rather than adding anything major, like new raid types.
Maybe in the future, Meet Your Maker will be a better game that addresses some of our issues with it, but right now we're not so sure. Maybe it's gonna get better once the community takes to it and figures out a bit more. Like I said, this is just early first impressions, but yeah. You can try it for yourself, I guess, if you have PlayStation Plus, so it's not that big of a deal. It's out on a lot of things. I think ultimately, if you're just tired of remakes or sequels and you want to try something new, there is something new and creative here, and we're going to give them points for that.
We can't come down too hard on them, because this is a good idea. But again, this is just our first impressions. You know how this goes by now. It's a Before You Buy. We give you some pros, some cons, and some personal opinion, and now we want to hear yours down in the comments.