Aztaka

There are many reasons to like Aztaka, a two dimensional RPG and the first release from Citeremis. The game seems to hail from times past but, to their credit, Citeremis have crammed elements from the four corners of the videogaming world to make something a little more unique.

You are Huitzilo a warrior and mage who is sent to save your people from the wrath of the Gods. A rich story then unfolds, utilising Aztec legends and characters. The imagery is lush with a good eye for correct tribal stylings and the music again harks back to times past. This makes an attractive package where time has obviously been spent to get the look and feel right. So all is good in the lands of the Aztecs then?

Whenever Aztaka achieves something brilliant you seem to find yourself offset with something a little coarse. Where some edges in gameplay have been smoothed to a fine polish there are others which just become picky and irritating. Explanation for certain game elements is often non-existent and it's certainly not helped along by an almost pointless help screen that merely tells players what the controls are. In fact, that is a great example of some of the slack elements that bring the game down somewhat.

Let's take spell casting as another example. When you run the mouse over the spell symbol, instructions tell you how much energy they use and a little of what they do. However, at no point is the casting method actually explained and it takes a while to realise you have to follow the symbols around the screen to complete the casting. It would be more annoying if you hadn't realised that with a little care monsters are quite easy to beat and spells are actually not as necessary as they first appear.

Other niggles include the fact that you can't save when you want, with the game auto-saving your progress when you've finished the sometimes vast levels. It would be nice if you could click to pass through doorways and portals from a distance rather than having to walk up to them to trigger this option and an auto pickup feature would provide less mouse fiddling which is unnecessarily prevelant throughout most elements of the game Sometimes when you've acted on your environment the changes stay whilst at other points they disappear erratically.

This is another element of Aztaka that involves using four types of energy to change your surroundings. This can be used to grow branches on trees, affect rocks and so on. It's a nice element and you find receptacles to store this energy. However, sometimes your character has trouble traversing the terrain you have just altered, especially branches and you'll find yourself falling off, or never even getting on in the first place.

As with most RPG games you can tool your character up as levels increase, buy items from the 'shop', even if you are standing several leagues from the shopkeeper and upgrade statistics to make the fights easier. All these elements are again handled well once you get past the lack of instruction.

Citeremis have almost transformed old-school stylings into something new, but not quite. For every great point of development there is a lil' devil lurking around in the background. These aren't actual coding faults but issues that cause gameplay to suffer. It's great to see new developers re-work old ideas in a fresh format and in the end Aztaka holds its own, but play the free demo available on the site, before parting with valuable cash, to avoid disappointment.