Rock of Ages 3: Make & Break

Together, Make and Break showcase the strengths and weaknesses of Rock of Ages 3 overall. At its best, it's a thrilling and often hilarious ride through an imaginative and surreal landscape. At its worst, its formula is too rigid, its challenges too rote, and it can feel like your frustration with its idiosyncrasies could boil over at any moment. Thankfully, in such times, the bite-size structure comes to the rescue, and you can roll into something new.

Disappointing it may be to see the same infrequent defining of difficulty — as much the over-reliance on visual gags at the cost of gameplay variety where it matters — Rock of Ages III: Make & Break still manages to entice, but not impress. At the very least, ensuring players will gladly once again come back for another roll down a winding level or two.

There’s a lot to like about Rock of Ages 3, but its tower defence half simply isn’t one of them. Thankfully, community-made levels will keep the game fresh for a long time.

Rock of Ages 3 could be incredibly popular with the right audience with its impressive inclusion of map-making on top of its wacky, over the top design. But there are so many caveats to what you need to enjoy the game, its hard to see it reaching widespread appeal.

Rock of Ages 3 is an additional serving of the series in a party-sized bag. What could have been the culmination of a decade of progress feels more like a thrown-together greatest hits collection. Diehards will find lots to like about the potentially endless supply of community creations and this also drives up potential value for newcomers. A high level of patience will be required as the bugs nearly derail the experience but the current version of the game can be made solid with the help of a few patches. It is not as exciting as it once was, but you could certainly do worse.

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 same charm.