Published , by Donovan Erskine
Published , by Donovan Erskine
Behaviour Interactive revealed Meet Your Maker in 2022, teasing a game that brings the Super Mario Maker formula to first-person RPGs. Developed by Behaviour Interactive in Montreal, the game is slated to arrive later this year. Ahead of the open beta this week, we got to play an early preview of Meet Your Maker. I raided Outposts, built my own, and got a better idea of what to expect in the full release.
Meet Your Maker finds players struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world after a deadly virus has destroyed civilization. Given the role of a “Custodian,” they’re tasked with recovering a rare genetic material that will help humanity to finally fight back against the virus. The only problem is that this genetic material, referred to as Genmat, is held under lock and keep at various Outposts around the world, which are rigged with guards and deadly traps.
Outposts are player-built bases in Meet Your Maker. As a Raider, your goal is to infiltrate these Outposts and successfully retrieve the Genmat stored deep within. While raiding Outposts, I frequently died as I tried to get a better sense of the layout and the various hazards waiting inside. These hazards include traps like spike walls that will trigger if you enter their vicinity and ones that will fire harpoon-like objects at a distance. There are also guards, monstrous creatures that have ranged and melee weapons of their own, which they will use to thwart your attempts to steal Genmat.
Players are equipped with a gun and a melee weapon, though these can be upgraded and swapped for other weapons down the road. These weapons are used to take out guards and deactivate traps. Learning where the hazards are, and dispatching them, while managing your stock of ammunition is a core part of the gameplay loop as a raider in Meet Your Maker.
Once you successfully steal the Genmat, the mission is only halfway over. As players attempt to escape the Outpost, there will be new traps, ones that weren’t there previously. If they’re able to make it out alive, they’ll be rewarded with various currencies and resources that can be used to upgrade their own weapons, traps, guards, and suit.
As a builder, players can buy plots of land to build their Outpost on. These plots aren’t cheap, so you’ll need to do a good amount of raiding before you can experience life on the other side. Once you go into the building mode, you can place blocks to create a base around the coveted Genmat. You can outfit your base with traps, meticulously placing them in areas where you hope they’ll catch raiders by surprise. With guards, you can actually manually step into their shoes and set a patrol route for them.
Once your Outpost is complete, it can be published for players around the world to experience. Once I was done with my Outpost, I logged off for a few hours to run errands and have some dinner. When I came back, there were new stats and analytics for my base. Several players had attempted my Outpost, most of them dying on their first attempt. Some of them left feedback for me, tagging my level as “brutal” or “fun.” I was also able to passively earn more resources for the players that I successfully killed within my Outpost.
Meet Your Maker has all of the fixings of classic level-making games. It has strong shades of Super Mario Maker and Halo’s Forge mode, with the visual style and gore of a Doom game. With an intriguing concept and solid foundation, we’re curious to see how the full experience lands when it comes out of open beta later this year.