‘Meet Your Maker’ Now Available for PC and Consoles, Will Feature Regular Content Updates [Trailer]

The GenMat is close. You’ve run through a hallway of spike traps, flamethrowers and a holographic wall that concealed a pair of hulking brutes ready to chop you into bloody chunks. You carefully peak around corners, making sure the coast is clear, catching a last minute flying guard swooping down on you. As you approach your reward, you hear a familiar beep accompanied by a clattering of metal as bombs rain down on you from above. At the last second you grapple to safety, only to get skewered by a hail of arrows from a wall trap that you missed in the chaos. This is the experience you’ll have in the latest game from Behaviour Interactive, creators of the long-running multiplayer game Dead by Daylight.

Meet Your Maker throws you into a post-apocalyptic wasteland where you, as a Custodian of the Chimera, wage a war over genetic material, or GenMat for short, that will hopefully lead to the salvation of all life on Earth. This conflict plays out in two distinct gameplay phases that interact with each other asynchronously. In order to harvest the GenMat, you need to build up an Outpost to protect the extraction site. To keep it safe, you’ll have to equip your Outpost with all manners of deadly traps and lethal guards that can slow down any raiders. On the other side of the game, you’ll break into other people’s bases, which can be done alone or with a partner, in order to steal their GenMat out from under their noses. It’s two completely different modes of play, but they feed into each other perfectly while feeling fun and satisfying on their own merits.

Raiding an Outpost is an exciting first person experience that changes pace naturally as you continue to die and retry. When starting out, you’ll be carefully walking through trying to peek around corners to scout for traps and guards. Everything is one hit kill, so you’ll frequently end up getting caught off guard by ceiling spikes or a blast from a flying monstrosity and find yourself back at the beginning. The game reloads quickly upon death, so it’s easy to start memorizing the layout, creating a speedrun-like situation where you’ve mastered the level and can disarm everything with ease on your way to the GenMat. To make sure that exiting the Outpost isn’t a dull exercise in retreading areas you’ve already cleared out, traps can have modifiers that allow them to only show up after the GenMat has been grabbed, so you’re exfiltration will be just as fraught with danger as your infiltration.

When you enter an Outpost, you’ll always be equipped with a pair of weapons, ranging from guns to swords to a defensive shield. Your guns have very limited ammo, but the bolts can be picked up after firing them, making you consider each shot carefully. There may be a guard in the distance that’s menacing you, but retrieving your ammo after killing him may prove to be challenging, so making the decision on the fly is a critical part of your dungeon crawl. A grappling hook lets you zip around to places you can’t reach with your generous double jump, but moving quickly with the hook puts you in danger of running into unscouted traps. You can also equip an arsenal of consumable tools that will aid you, like a respawn point, speed booster or good old fashioned grenade. These are great for emergencies, helping you dig yourself out of a situation you first thought unpassable.

Since the Outpost content is all user generated, the game would fall apart if level creation was fiddly or challenging, but Meet Your Maker provides simple, easy-to-learn tools that will have you building murder mazes in no time. When you claim a new plot of land, there will be some pre-existing elements that cannot be changed, and you’re given free reign to build whatever you want around that. A clear path to the GenMat and a minimum defense requirement are all you need to fulfill in order to activate your Outpost. All geometry in the game is cube-based, so it’s easy to wrap your head around the area and lay things out. Traps can be positioned on the walls, floors and ceiling with a click, and guards can be plopped anywhere just as simply. There’s even a system included where you can ‘record’ a patrol route for your guards to give them a bit more dynamism, making level design easy for beginners and newcomers alike. While it may not be your main interest, building levels is heavily incentivized with a sort of passive income that will keep you leveling up even when not playing the game. Once your base runs out of GenMat to harvest, you can spend resources to prestige it, allowing you to collect GenMat again.

Even when you’ve activated your level, it’s a blast to keep noodling with the layout after other players get a chance to run through it. You’re able to watch replays of other raiders, learning what works and what doesn’t work in your Outpost. There’s even a neat feature that allows you to walk through your base and see little tokens at all the places players died, giving you a heat map of kill points. This also leaves behind some resources to gather, so you’re encouraged to hop in and take a look. Learning from raiding others bases and watching replays of your own is incredibly satisfying. I often would find myself dying during a raid and writing down a quick note of the trap setup that killed me so I could incorporate other people’s tricks into my own levels.

As you gather the three different resources throughout the different modes of play, you can make upgrades to your raiding gear and your Outpost capabilities. This is done by talking to five different advisors that reside in your home base. Aside from unlocking new equipment to protect you while you loot bases, you can also upgrade them, making you more effective at navigating safely. The real fun for me was unlocking different mods to add to my trap arsenal. Being able to alter the behavior of these traps helped keep my dungeons fresh and gave me something to strive for while continuing to grind for more resources. The amount of different meters that fill up after a raid was slightly overwhelming, and sometimes their links to the resources I was receiving wasn’t exactly clear, but I still felt like I was earning things at a satisfying pace to keep me hooked and coming back for more.

While Meet Your Maker isn’t a completely unique setting, there’s enough personality in the visuals to make the world feel compelling and lived in, setting it apart from your standard post-apocalypse. Your advisors have a little bit of personality, but it doesn’t seem like there will be a ton of focus on lore and narrative going forward. Outposts are a wonderful combination of dilapidated industrial steel and sand-blasted stone, with a wide range of palette options for you to make your deathtraps into works of art. Even during the review period, people were making some truly impressive levels, both visually and layout-wise, so I can’t wait to see what people make when it’s widely available.

Behaviour Interactive has released a three month post-launch roadmap for content for Meet Your Maker, which makes me excited to see where this game goes. This game will live and die based on how much players engage with the Outpost creation, but it already looks like the developers are committed to continue to add new tools for players to work with. For me, Meet Your Maker is a perfect lunch break game. In an hour, I could raid a few Outposts, tinker with my existing creations and maybe even start building a new level, giving me a complete experience in a bite-sized chunk of time while still making me want to come back again and again. If the history of Dead by Daylight is any indication, Meet Your Maker will continue to evolve in compelling and creative ways, and I can’t wait to see where this game goes in the future.