Meet Your Maker is Mario Maker, with the violence turned up to 11 – Preview

Creating a deathtrap is one thing, but surviving it in Meet Your Maker is another ordeal. For fans of the Mario Maker series, Meet Your Maker is similar in concept, where you’ll be creating a unique base using various tools and objects to defend the core of it from any would-be invaders trying to steal your resources. After you’ve finished creating an ideal base and wait to see it in action, you’ll be attacking other bases created by the Meet Your Maker community to earn precious assets used to further outfit your lair.

The core of a sandbox base builder

The game is a large sandbox from Behaviour Interactive, the developers behind the Dead By Daylight game. The team does a good job of guiding you on how to best use the multiple tools and resources they give you without directing you too much about what you should be doing. It’s an extremely open-ended experience, and there’s plenty of room for you to explore the base maker to make something that feels like enough of a challenge that players won’t effortlessly walk into bases, but they’re not impossible to solve.

What has me enjoying Meet Your Maker isn’t the creations I make or the way the game encourages me to come up with a creative array of traps to stump any unsuspecting players. What Meet Your Maker does so well is have me appreciate the puzzles and innovative design of other players, inspiring me to craft similar creations in my base and see if I can’t spin them so slightly to make them a notch harder.

My time spent on Meet Your Maker consistently had me switching between being a raider on other bases and hammering on mine. What was someone’s puzzle became my puzzle, and trying to fit it into the bases I made was a great deal of fun. Failing to raid another player’s base effectively was never a headache, but a creative opportunity, and finding the solution remained an exciting challenge.

A deeper level to raiding

There’s a lot of wiggle room for you to make these bases, but less so when invading them. You have limited weaponry to take on a raid. You must be careful about using your weapons, such as the Volt Launcher which only has a handful of shots. The grappling hook is also an extremely versatile tool that makes leaping in the interior of a base exciting, leading to creative escapes or incredibly unfortunate demises when you don’t immediately catch sight of a carefully placed trap waiting for you. It’s a blessing, and a perfect raid-ending tool.

What becomes genuinely challenging in every base you assault is when you finally reach the center of it and make off with the wonderful prize, a new array of traps and guards appear as the final challenge before you escape. It forces you not to take the path you just took for granted.

By effectively creating two challenges, it makes reaching the end only one-half of the journey. Escape is the real test, and those who become too complacent in the second half of a raid may find themselves missing out on leaving a base with the real prize. Thankfully, players can retry a base multiple times, and failure is more of a learning opportunity than a painful experience.

Where Meet Your Maker will truly excel is on the Streamer front, with players holding live streams as they construct their bases or when they go out to raid other players. There’s a lot of room for players to react similarly to Mario Makers. However, these are far more violent, and there’s plenty of room for the development team to add more materials, base items, and creative traps to this solid foundation.