King of Meat's level editor has depth while being easy to grasp

Any game that relies heavily on user-generated content needs to make sure it has easy-to-grasp creation tools, and thankfully, King of Meat does just that.

This game sees up to four players run the gauntlet of levels that combine Fall Guys-style obstacle courses with smashing your way through hordes of enemies, and solving some puzzles while you’re at it; all the with the goal of entertaining the ravenous crowd and grabbing as much loot as possible on your way to the exit.

One of the main gimmicks is that every level will be designed by other players, and I got the chance to get hands-on with the creation tools in this preview to get to grip with how it all works. I immediately got a sense of the depth on offer, which is a big tick for a game that is going to rely so heavily on levels made in this creator. The game does a pretty good job of showing this off too, as the launch version will have a bunch of developer-made levels that were all created in this level editor, which serves as a great example of what can be done.

As you might expect if you’ve played with many level editors before, the PC controls aren’t the best, as everything is clearly designed to be as smooth as possible on a controller. This isn’t a huge deal, given that the whole game is generally designed to prioritize the controller, but it’s still a pain if you prefer to use keyboard and mouse.

The upside is that when you do switch to controller, everything is very easy to use, with an interface that’s easy to read, well-organized tabs, and intuitive functionality. For example, if you want to link a pressure pad or a switch up to something – be it to open a door or activate a trap – you can do that just by holding down the button and dragging it over to whatever object you want it to activate.

You’re also heavily encouraged to think about the progression of your dungeons thanks to the Hype Meter. When you’re playing through a dungeon, you need to keep in the midst of the action as much as possible to build your hype meter, which acts as a score multiplier, affecting what tier of rewards you earn at the end. You keep that hype meter up by collecting treasure, killing enemies, or even just smashing up random boxes in the levels, so when you’re creating a stage, you have to take that flow into consideration as well.

You can’t go too crazy though, as the editor also gives you performance indicators that limit how much stuff you can put in a level. The amount of rooms, connected switches/logic gates, and props all contribute to this, and while they aren’t especially harsh, I can see more advanced creators rubbing up against these limitations when trying to create cool stuff. However, it is nice that the game is forthcoming with this information, unlike so many others that leave it to trial and error.

This is just one side of King of Meat, but it is a fairly impressive one. This is a game that will live and die on the community it builds, and with tools like this, I’m hopeful that players will stick around to explore all it has to offer.