Rock Of Ages III: Make & Break

Review

On the main menu screen, you’ll find Make, Break, Customise and Options, on the left side of the screen you’ll see the latest updates for the game. Selecting Break will allow you to choose Tutorial, Story and Community Levels.

Playing the tutorial will have you play as Odysseus who has just made landfall along with his fellow Greeks. You then smell some food cooking so with grumbling bellies you head off in the direction of the food. You enter a cave from where the smell of the food is emanating, passing a huge bed as you make your way to the food cooking over a fire. Paying no attention to the bed, you start eating and throwing the empty bones outside. It’s here that Polyphemus returns home with his flock of sheep; Polyphemus is a cyclops and he isn’t happy that you’ve invaded his home and eaten his food. You try to escape the cave and one of your crew gets stamped upon and eaten by the cyclops. He now rolls a large boulder into the cave’s entrance, trapping you in the cave with him. Knowing that you have no way out and that the he has already eaten, Polyphemus goes to bed for some beauty sleep.

You (Odysseus) have a cunning plan! Tying the sheep together into a giant ball, you can roll the sheep downhill and hit the boulder that’s blocking the exit out of the way. The faster you roll, the harder you’ll hit the boulder; it will take more than one hit to move the boulder and set you free. After your first roll downhill, obstacles will appear on the track; these will slow you down or block your path. In this tutorial, if you hit anything, you could lose some of the sheep in your ball. If you lose too many of your sheep, then you may not be strong enough to move the boulder at the end.

After removing the boulder that’s blocking the exit, Polyphemus awakes with his club dropping into his eye, blinding him. However, he manages to make it to the cave entrance, stopping you from escaping. Although Polyphemus is blind, he could still grab you as you exit the cave, so to escape you and your crew clamber to the underside of the sheep to exit the cave. Once out of the cave Polyphemus closes the cave entrance with the boulder again, thinking that you are trapped within. However, you make it back to your ship where you start taunting the cyclops, so he throws the boulder that was blocking his cave. The boulder lands on you, squashing you while everyone else gets thrown from the ship.

With Odysseus squashed you’ll continue on as Elpenor; Polyphemus is still after you, but you’ve managed to hide behind the gates of a castle. Polyphemus is at the top of the hill and has plenty of boulders to keep throwing at you. You’ll be safe as long as those boulders don’t break through the gates of your castle. As it happens, your crew are skilled builders, so you’ll be able to construct defenses to stop the boulders from reaching you. While you are placing the defenses, the enemy will also be placing them down on your track to stop you from smashing down his gate. The winner will be the one to enter the castle of their opponent. It can take two or three bashes on a gate before it gives way; if it doesn’t give way at first then you’ll restart at the beginning of the track once a new boulder has been carved out for you to roll down the track. Each time you restart at the beginning and are waiting on a new boulder, you can add new defenses.

After completing the tutorial, you find yourself on the World Map, where there’s a white line with dates marked on it at certain points. Where you start, the date is 842 B; nearby are Padlocks with Stars on the front of them, which indicate how many Stars you must own in order to open that Padlock. Once opened, each padlock will reveal a new location. There are various game types at each location; maybe four or five types. The game types which you will come across are War, Obstacle Course, Time Trials, Skee Boulder and Unit Challenge.

War is where you’ll place defenses against your opponent’s map and try to reach and break into their castle before they do the same. Unit Challenge is the same, although you’ll have limited resources with which to build your defenses. Time Trials has you rolling a bomb down towards the enemy’s weapons stashed behind the walls of their castle. You must reach the enemy’s stash before your rolling bomb explodes. Skee Boulder is where you’ll need to break as many targets as possible and be the first to land in the giant platform at the end of the track; doing so will multiply your final score.

With each game there are objectives which will determine how many stars you’ll collect for completing that level. Also scattered around the world map are small islands with Pillars upon then; these are new Defenses which you can unlock. The number of stars on the pillars indicates how many stars it will take to unlock the new defenses. You can customise your Army Leader, decorate your Boulder, and choose a banner; you can also choose a colour for your banner and boulder decoration. You will also unlock new boulders to play with and you can choose which to use on any map as you start that level; a light boulder may be better than a heavier one while on time trials, but less effective when trying to bash down a door.

You can also play against other players online and you can even make your own maps; I haven’t tried either of these yet so I’m unsure of any outcome. However, if the online games are anything like they were in the second iteration of the game then it was certainly fun, especially after spanking The Cpt Froggy’s botty.

In the options, you’ll find settings for Camera (Boulder View, Camera Sensitivity, Camera FOV, Camera Adjustment Speed, Invert Y Axis), Strategy View  (Rotation Speed, Movement Speed and Border Movement), Video (Resolution, Brightness, Window mode, Vertical Sync and Quality), Advanced Video Settings (Texture Quality, Antialiasing, Effects, Shadow, Postprocess Quality, Resolution Quality, View Distance Quality, Mirror View Distance and Motion Blur Quality), Controls (Global Controls for both Keyboard and Game Pad, Boulder Mode, Construction Mode), Audio (Sound Effects and Music), Game (Language - English, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Korean, Russian and Spanish - Difficulty, Controller Vibration, Destructible Density, Voice Chat, Show Rankings and Delete Progress).

Review written by Piston Smashed™ for Zeepond.com!