Meet Your Maker Review (Half-Past Seven)
The premise of the game is simple: you are a desertpunk badass who is trying to resurrect humanity in a barren wasteland. To do that, you need the DNA of humans from mass graves on the planet, but you aren't the only one trying to get it. Thus, your goal is to build your mining rigs to extract the DNA (genetic material, or GenMat for short) with traps to defend them from incoming raiders, and raid the mining rigs of other players.
This game is really two genres put together into one! Half of the game is 3D platforming, where you can take it slow and disable every trap and enemy, or fast like a competitive Quake player. The other half is base building, where your goal is to prevent other players from reaching your genmat while killing them as much as possible to get the resources they drop. Both are generally well executed, and I haven't encountered any major bugs since the closed alpha. Both are Co-Op with 1 player.
This game is hard.
...but bases are generally categorized by difficulty and lower difficulty bases provide less resources when successfully raided.
Players are incentivized to make their bases as difficult to clear as possible so they can milk the most resources out of raiders. Since you will be raiding a lot, you will be dying a lot, especially since you die in one hit. Having to restart the mission from the beginning is very frustrating, so be prepared if you buy this game. It can get stressful.
That being said, as a fan of high difficulty games, there is a lot of room for skill expression. Quick thinking, good reflexes, and intelligent decision making will save you on every raid while inspired level design will net you the most resources from each of your bases. The feeling of completing a hard map overshadows the feeling of dying 40 times to the same enemy!
Interesting playstyles leads to fun gameplay (you get a freaking grapple hook) and great replayability.
And you can play with 1 friend!
Honest rating: 7/10
...and it would be an 8.5 out of 10 if it was around $20.
My Biases:
- I love high difficulty games like Soulsbournes and rouge-likes.
- I put in about 300 hours between both playtests.
Some criticisms:
- Launching with a cosmetic DLC always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Additionally, the DLC includes base colorations that hide traps well, meaning that there is a gameplay advantage in owning the DLC (albeit a slight one).
- I think alpha/beta testers were supposed to get special cosmetics, but maybe I just haven't figured out where to get mine at.
- As time goes on, players will find the most efficient way to design their base which will put off new players and slowly decrease the variability of levels.
I haven't met my maker yet but I look forward to the chance!