Rock of Ages 3: Make & Break is the third in the series of the Tower Defence cum Marble Race mash-up. For those unaware, the basic premise is to roll your boulder down a course littered with obstacles to smash down your opponent's castle doors before they do the same to yours.

Whilst waiting for your boulder to be chisled, you're able to lay down various traps, weapons and barriers to try and slow down - or even better - destroy your enemy's boulder.

Compared to the previous games there are more courses, race types, boulders and defensive tools. There's also a bit more polish and the ability to create your own courses and race on ones other people have created (I have not tried these features yet so can't comment on them).

On the flipside though, the ability to use L2 on a controller to jump has been removed and there is no control configuration options either. Worse though is that, unlike the previous two games, this iteration just doesn't have that je ne sais quoi. I can't put my finger on it, but I'm finding playing this a slog, to be perfectly honest. The first two I couldn't stop playing but that hasn't seemed to transfer over to this game.

All in all, if you haven't played a Rock of Ages game yet, get the second one. If you have that, I'd still recommend the first one before this. For those who have played both the first two and have an itch to scratch, I'd say to wait until it's on sale before purchasing. It's not a bad game by any means but just doesn't feel like it improves on it's predecessors in a meaningfull enough way to warrant buying it at full price.

Like Mario Kart? Don't have a Nintendo console? Well this is as near as you can get on a PC. It's not perfect but it's still a fun game with a decent amount of content.

Positives:

+ The courses are varied, vibrant, creative and, well, amazing in general! A few courses can be a bit too big in places leading to you getting lost the first time round but this is a minor thing when you take all the other aspects of the courses into account.

+ 18 characters to start with (all bar two of them can be levelled up with racing too) and a further 12 to unlock gives a good variety of racers. Some are a bit too close in attributes to tell any difference but, by and large, the selection is better than most racers.

+ It's fun. I can't explain exactly how or why so I'll leave it at that.

Negatives:

- Starting the game did give me a scare at first as I encountered an error immediately, followed by a ctd (crash to desktop). Second attempt to start though, everything went fine. This might be due to a supposed option to configure the controllers not appearing for me though, which brings me to...

- ...there is no in-game way to change your controls. Which wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that the controls are not shown anywhere bar loading screens - and even then they only explain opne at a time. My first load screen simply stated "Press [RT] to accelerate." Great, I now know how to accelerate and that's it. I ended up pausing and quickly checking online to find them - fortunately they are very simple. This, however, is a massive oversight; why is there no way to even view the controls in-game? It must be even worse for keyboard users as at least controllers have less buttons to check!

- The handling is...okay. It's not bad per se but the vehicles just don't have a sense of weight to them. This also affects the sense of speed a tad too - it just lacks 'oomph'. It's not bad in a sense of unresponsive or broken, it just feels off without being detrimental.

- The audio changes do not affect the title screen. Prepare to have your ears blasted when you start the game, as well as when you exit the game (you have to go back to the title screen to exit).

Overall:

Although I mentioned Mario Kart earlier I feel that this is more akin to Diddy Kong Racing on the N64. It's a great game that's only real flaw is that it's not as good as the leading kart series. That's not a bad thing though as - imo - the Mario Kart series is one of the best in gaming ever and it'd be hard to topple it.

This is a very solid second choice though if you have a Nintendo console. If you don't, then you can't get better than Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed (although the name is quite unwieldy!).

Tl;dr - If you want a kart racer and have a Nintendo console, get a Mario Kart game. If you want a kart racer and don't have a Nintendo console, get this game!