Review: Rock of Ages 3: Make & Break Is Irreverent Fun, Up to a Point

Make & Break is at its best when injecting variety into the campaign, not only mixing up the environments but the game modes.

Rock of Ages 3: Make & Break
Photo: Modus Games

Julius Caesar. Genghis Khan. Queen Elizabeth I. Moctezuma. According to Chilean development studio ACE Team, these historical figures do battle according to a blueprint followed since the very beginning of time—that is, rolling huge boulders down a winding track, weaving between enemy defenses, and ramming castle gates, hoping to squish an opponent who will give a high-pitched squeal whenever a door is broken down.

The first Rock of Ages is one of the stranger games to ever receive multiple sequels, but Rock of Ages 3: Make & Break (developed in conjunction with Giant Monkey Robot) hardly alters the formula of its predecessors. You place trebuchets, towers, catapults, and other objects in hopes of obstructing and damaging the enemy boulder until it’s time to take control of your own, grappling with its considerable momentum to guide it to the target.

The concept has always felt a little chaotic and unrefined; the strategy portion is hardly unimportant, but the time constraints and the limited selection of units you bring into each battle give it something of a fevered, random quality. The boulder-rolling again seems far and away more consequential, dependent on who hits the enemy’s door first and hasn’t lost as much momentum along the way. But the chaos is certainly thrilling, too, as objects crumble beneath your boulder and you pick up potentially unwieldy levels of speed.

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Filled with irreverent cut-out animations that depict things like the flying head of Elizabeth I shooting lasers, Make & Break has a blissfully goofy quality to it. Some of the obstacles you’ll place are whales or lions hanging from balloons, and the strange proceedings unfold against a soundscape of screams and incongruously stately classical music. Across the campaign, you’ll launch not only a variety of jumping boulders with faces at the enemy gates, but a snowball, a meatball, a wheel of cheese, and one rock shaped like a huge fist.

In short, to take the game with any particular seriousness, to regard it as anything more than exactly the madcap diversion it aspires to be, would be to miss the point. And Make & Break is at its best when injecting variety into the campaign, not only mixing up the environments but the game modes. Though each campaign location contains a classic “war” confrontation with some historical figure, activities like time trials, obstacle courses, and an all-defense mode against an onslaught of enemy boulders stave off any monotony.

But at their core, these are markedly repetitive games. In practice, the obstacles change very little of how you play, with one demanding a split-second jump rather than another that mandates you dodge to the side. And with that in mind, the level creator introduced here is hardly transformative; the environments of these games have always seemed vaguely interchangeable, and being able to design your own tracks only highlights the fundamental similarity between them. The series mainly distinguishes itself through its bizarre atmosphere, as well as its capacity to surprise by introducing new environments and characters, but remixing familiar templates in a level creator captures little of that charm.

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This game was reviewed using a review code provided by Tinsley PR.

Score: 
 Developer: ACE Team, Giant Monkey Robot  Publisher: Modus Games  Platform: PC  Release Date: July 21, 2020  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Cartoon Violence, Mild Blood  Buy: Game

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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