Editorials
‘Meet Your Maker’ Open Beta – Previewing the New Video Game from Behaviour Interactive
Knowing Behaviour Interactive’s success with Dead by Daylight, I was very surprised at the announcement of Meet Your Maker. Not because I wasn’t expecting another asymmetrical multiplayer game, but rather because I wasn’t expecting something so completely different. Gone are the creepy forests and dilapidated manors, replaced by a brutal and desperate post apocalypse. Meet Your Maker casts you as a Custodian of the Chimera, a living experiment created to participate in a conflict over pure genetic material, a resource that will hopefully help save all life on Earth.
One thing that this game does have in common with Dead by Daylight is that there are two very distinct modes of play, though this time they interact asynchronously. In order to extract the genetic material from the wasteland, you need to build an outpost that will protect the area during the extraction process. This involves laying out your base and outfitting it with a variety of traps or guards for maximum lethality. The other way to obtain the material is to break into one of these outposts and steal it, which can alternatingly feel like a careful, deliberate dungeon crawl or a mad dash through an increasingly dangerous deathtrap.
When raiding outposts, you play from a snappy first person perspective using a small assortment of weapons and tools to help you as you make your way through the dungeons. However, these items all have smart limitations that make you think carefully about each move you make. Your tools, like grenades and shields, have limited uses and need to be purchased between missions, so you’ll end up saving those for dire times of need. A sword will help you for times when you’re trying to destroy nearby traps or enemies that have closed distance. Closing distance is also easy for you to do, thanks to the help of a grappling hook that zips you around with relative ease. Most interestingly, your ranged weapon, which is like a high tech crossbow of sorts, has very limited ammo, forcing you to pick up your bolts to continue using it. It’s an incredibly smart move that makes you think about every shot you make. Do you take out that ranged guy all the way across the room with your last bolt, or do you try to dodge until you get a better sense of what’s in between you and him?
The outposts themselves are handcrafted mazes that are particularly lethal, since one will kill you. Traps are placed on ceilings, floors or walls, and include short-range spikes, perpetually moving pistons or a wall of arrows that can shoot across the room. Each can be destroyed with an attack, but that makes it easy for another carefully placed trap to kill you while distracted. Guards come in different varieties, but usually will try to rush the player until they are in attack range, whether that’s melee or projectile range. They’re each visually distinct so you can immediately tell which one you’re dealing with and adjust your reaction accordingly. Your loop through an outpost starts with you quietly sneaking around each corner to scout for traps and escalates to something like an exhilarating speedrun as you begin to memorize the layout. This process can be done cooperatively with a friend, but works perfectly well as a solo experience.
Since the game is intended to be populated with user-generated outposts (the beta starts with several developer designed maps ready to help simulate the experience of the live game), none of this would work if it was a slog for players to build. Thankfully the tools are simple while also giving you tons of options to make the dungeon of your dreams. All the geometry in the game is cube-based, so it’s easy for people with no level design experience to understand the process of laying things out. This can either be done walking through in first person like a player or flying through with a more freeform camera. Additional traps and guards are unlocked as you progress, allowing you to continue to evolve further bases. A replay system gives you the opportunity to watch recordings of other players running through your bases, showing you what works and what doesn’t as you continue to learn how to make more diabolical deathtraps. Raiders of your base can rate it with various adjectives based on their experience, and I found it surprisingly compelling to log in and see notifications about how many kills your base got while I was away and how many people rated it “fun.”
Both modes of the game will help you accumulate resources that you’ll need to buy new weapons, gear, traps and guards. Various currencies are dropped by guards and traps as you raid, and you fill a series of progression meters by successfully stealing from outposts. Your active outposts offer a form of passive income, while also providing bonuses for killing other players who try to raid your base. Outposts only continue to earn for a specific amount of time, forcing you to either prestige them to restart the process or simply start a new base. The amount of meters and currencies is slightly overwhelming and a bit hard to follow, but it didn’t detract from my experience overall.
The Doom-meets-desert aesthetics of Meet Your Maker immediately made the world feel compelling and lived in, providing a lot of character to a somewhat standard post apocalyptic world. The visual options for building are varied enough that you can turn your outpost made of sand, rust and stone into a wasteland work of art that’s as beautiful as it is brutal. The traps are the perfect combo of futuristic and industrial, and the guards are all hideous mutants with bolted-on cybernetics. Your visually interesting Sanctuary rounds out the package, with a full cast of characters to interact with as you upgrade your various systems.
Based on my time with the open beta, the bones of Meet Your Maker are incredibly solid. The raiding provides a satisfying challenge that’s fast and lethal, while the building is simple yet complex enough for you to create a variety of heavily fortified outposts that you quickly become invested in. It’s a bit hard for me to get a good sense of how the game will progress as you continue, as it seems like the game will need a bit more variety in your character builds and outpost options to make it stand the test of time. Meet Your Maker will live or die based on people’s investment in creating content for players to run through, and I really hope that it catches on and gets the opportunity to flourish. Its combination of Mario Maker and Mad Max make for a compelling and unique multiplayer experience that gets its hooks in you.
Meet Your Maker will be released on April 4, but you can catch the open beta as part of Steam Next Fest, which runs until February 13.
The problem with filming sequels back-to-back is that, unless you can afford expensive reshoots, there’s no easy way to adjust course in between movies if fans react badly to where the story is headed. That’s why it’s important to have a complete narrative thought out well in advance lest you accidentally kill a budding franchise.
However, this isn’t always the case. Every once in a while, it seems like the cinema gods smile upon certain chaotic productions and gift moviegoers with complete franchises that feel like more than the sum of their hastily produced parts. Ted Nicolaou’s Bloodlust: Subspecies III is precisely one of these miraculous pictures, with the raw talents of the artists involved (as well as the continued support from Romania) turning the feature into an effective conclusion for a series that kind of made things up as the filmmakers went along.
That’s why I’d like to invite my fellow readers to join me on this third part of our journey through the Subspecies franchise as we look into Bloodlust and talk about how it remains a surprisingly satisfying finale to the original trilogy.
A Trilogy Planned on the Fly
Released only a year after Bloodstone found plenty of success in rental stores and mail-in VHS catalogues worldwide, 1994’s Bloodlust was produced at the same time as its predecessor in (mostly) the same locations and with the same team. This means that the movie benefited from all the same upgrades as Bloodstone, with the crew now being more experienced with the ins and outs of surviving a low-budget Romanian production and the cast really settling into their characters.
At this point, everything from location scouting to the makeup process had been streamlined, with Wayne Toth and Norman Cabrera, the main duo behind special effects, even switching out time-consuming prosthetics for latex gloves in order to speed up Anders Hove’s monstrous transformation. The titular “subspecies” demons were also once again relegated to a mere cameo appearance due to the laborious puppetry required to bring them to life.
The only real hiccup came from the fact that actress Denice Duff had replaced the first film’s Michelle (Laura Mae Tate) and was immediately expected to portray the character as both an innocent victim in part II and as a secondary villain in part III. According to behind-the-scenes interviews, the hectic production schedule that blended two different movies meant that Duff would often find herself having to alternate between two incredibly different versions of Michelle during the same shooting day – though it’s obvious that she’s having more fun with Bloodlust’s more traditionally vampiric version of her character.
In the finished film, we pick things up immediately where the previous entry left off as Rebecca (Melanie Shatner) is forced to leave her vampire sister Michelle (Duff) behind in the dungeons of Castle Vladislav due to the rising sun. This allows Mummy (Pamela Gordon) to use Michelle’s blood to revive the vicious Radu (Hove) so that he may continue his quest for the coveted Bloodstone – a magical artifact that perpetually drips the Blood of Saints.
Meanwhile, the dreamy US embassy agent Mel (Kevin Blair) agrees to help Rebecca plan a rescue mission, though they’re unaware that Radu has become infatuated with Michelle during his attempts to guide her growing bloodlust. This all culminates in a climactic confrontation meant to tie up all of the series’ loose ends in one of Full Moon Pictures’ most ambitious productions.
The Evolution of Radu
Like its predecessor, Bloodlust: Subspecies III was also warmly received by fans who argued that the series was an even bigger success than Full Moon’s other major horror franchise, Puppet Master. This praise wasn’t unanimous, however, as 1994 had seen the rise of a more modern breed of sexy vampire popularized by Anne Rice, with old-school Nosferatu like Radu being viewed as obsolete when compared to the likes of Lestat and Gary Oldman’s take on Dracula.
In a way, one might argue that Nicolaou’s film is something of a swan song for the classic vampire story, as Bloodlust combines all of the traditional elements we tend to associate with these tales into a single tragic yarn that ties a neat little bow on Radu’s story as well as the old-fashioned monster movies that he represents. The finale remains shocking despite the fact that this is the third time we see Radu get brutally killed onscreen, with the brief tease that he may one day return feeling more like a nod towards the nature of evil rather than sequel bait.
The film dabbles a bit in gothic romance and even explores the inherent power fantasy behind transforming into an immortal creature of the night, but the filmmakers never lose sight of Radu as a demonic force even when he’s willing to betray his beloved Mummy for Michelle’s sake. In fact, his twisted “love” for his fledgling makes him even creepier as we get the feeling that his passion comes from a dark and disturbing place.
Anders Hove is at his absolute best in this film, with the effects department boosting his moments of what the younger generation would call “aura farming” whenever Radu emerges from shadows like a 90s version of Count Orlok. There are even a couple of surprisingly effective jump-scares here, which is why I’d argue that Bloodlust cements Radu as one of the most memorable cinematic vampires of all time despite his humble origins.
Subspecies Saves Its Best For Last
Nicolaou and Vlad Panescu also saved the best for “last” (more on that in a bit) regarding the film’s visuals, with the cinematography and overall atmosphere of Bloodlust absolutely surpassing what we saw in the previous films. Everything feels appropriately climactic this time around (including the wonderful soundtrack that was co-composed alongside an authentic Romanian orchestra), and I appreciate how this is the fastest-paced entry in the trilogy since the film doesn’t need to waste time setting anything up.
Bloodlust still suffers from some of the same low-budget blemishes as its predecessors, but there’s so much creative passion here that no amount of wonky effects work or stilted dialogue can get in the way of appreciating the flick’s gothic grandeur. That’s why it’s not surprising that the movie’s definitive(-ish) ending would later be retconned as fans begged for more Radu.
Of course, the next entry in this series would be a different kind of vampiric endeavor altogether, with the filmmakers attempting to engage with the same trends that ultimately killed Radu and his antiquated kin. That, however, is a story for another time. For now, I’ll merely insist that Bloodlust: Subspecies III remains a highlight of Full Moon’s expansive catalogue and is definitely worth seeking out today.
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