Finishing the game, I have left with mixed, yet largely positive, feelings.

In Aztaka, you are the chosen warrior of the Tenochthitlan, or something. See, it's an action RPG platformer based on Aztec mythology, of which I admittedly am not an expert on. Because of this special setting, every name and event feels unique and at the same time rather confusing, for it can be difficult to remember who is who when you're dealing with a culture with a complicated spelling vastly different from yours.

You are actually playing two characters: the chosen warrior of the gods and a cursed wizard of sorts who is in the form of a hummingbird. Warrior handles the fighting and surviving, while the wizard-bird can cast protecting and attacking spells and get taunted by the antagonists. Both gain levels and become stronger by equipping special stuff.

Action part is the combat, of which there is a lot. At the beginning, combat is very clunky: your only attack is to thrust forward with the spear. You can also roll around and jump, but those do you little good, when the enemies do damage by simple touch and there's no invulnerability time involved with either. Combined with the fact many of them are evasive, jumpy or have blocks makes fighting some enemies a pain. But it gets better! Once (maybe two-three hours in the game) you will learn an upward strike to attack enemies in the air and even better, a jump strike, making your jumps damage enemies in return. This makes the combat tremendously simpler and more enjoyable.

There's also magic part to combat. You basically choose a spell and click on the boxes that appear to complete the incantation: missing one will ruin the spell. During this time the game is slowed down, so you simply have to be fast to avoid getting hit. The more complicated the spell, the more clicks are required. It's quite alright a magic system for a platformer.

So there is also a platforming part. This couples with the magic system, that also incorporates a use of magical energies that are dropped by enemies and used to interact with the world. For example, in the beginning you can grow branches into certain trees (it's not exactly a freeform ability), opening a route onward. There are four energy types, all of which have their own special powers in addition to their world interaction: for example, the green life energy doubles effectively as a bandage. Along the way you'll learn more skills akin to other platformers, like double jumps and wall jumps. Aztaka actually has one of the most powerful wall-jumping abilities I've seen, used many times to get to some hard-to-reach places.

Finally, there's the RPG aspect. You earn experience and levels by killing monsters and doing quests. At the same time you can increase your health and mana by finding bonus artefacts. There are 3 attributes per character and each level grants you one point to allocate. All the attributes are useful, though I found Agility to be a bit vague (the more you have, the more you'll inflict critical strikes). You may also increase the stats by quaffing stat-increasing potions, dropping randomly from enemies and you can even buy them later on. You'll also get a skill point every level. For the warrior skill points are very useful, but for the wizard it could have been useful to know that the spells become more expensive the more skill points they have.

It's not a true RPG though. There are no decisions to make, only a story to follow and the dialogue advancing without your concern. You can (and will) return to earlier places to look for missed loot and quest opportunities though. Sometimes, you might even be lost on what to do next: then the quest screen usually helps.

Music and graphics are fine and fit the setting. I did experience some fatal bugs along the way: some sprites would turn into black boxes, and shortly afterwards the game would crash (my card is AMD Radeon 5700 series, run on Win7 64-bit). This was mostly inconvenient, since restarting the game would fix the problems for several hours.

All in all, Aztaka is an alright platformer. It also reminds me of The Battle Of Olympus and Zelda II games on Nes. I played the game through on brutal difficulty (I suppose that's the most difficult one) and got 14 hours of game time along the way, dying quite a lot due to bad early decisions. After learning the jump attack skill I advanced a lot faster, and I reckon that's when the combat became more entertaining than a chore. So I'd wager to prepare for a slow start. The end game was very fast and easy because you can avoid any enemies by jumping over them, and the warrior becomes practically immortal before facing the final boss.

Too bad Aztaka has no achievements and that seems to be final. I could have squeezed a few extra hours out of it, but I doubt I'll return to it now. As a one-time quest, especially if received from a bundle or on a decent discount, it's certainly worth a buy and play-through. Just give it some time, bear with the clumsy combat of the beginning and try not to lose yourself within the quirky Aztek names.

The screenshots don't do this game justice, for how addictive and immersive it is.

An average side scroller with non-linear gameplay. I like the power ups and abilities scattered throughout the game that enable you return to places that were out of your reach previously. I also like the optional alternate quests that earn you gifts.
Unfortunately the moves are rather limited and you can't defend yourself against attackers; you have to attack, time their attacks and move away to dodge. So far all I can do is poke at enemies with a spear which gets repetitive fast. Edit: The combat improves somewhat later in the game, still rather boring though.
When you return to a place, all the enemies will have re-spawned and you get to kill them again... did I mention it is repetitive?
I can't get how the protection and attack spells work. I click on myself or the enemy and all that seems to happen is the enemy movements slow down, I still take the same amount of damage using protection spells & it doesn't look like they take any damage when I use an attack spell. Edit: You have to click on the spell icons that appear on yourself or the enemy in quick succession to complete the spell. Also, dragging and dropping energy on yourself to heal gets difficult when you're fighting off enemies. That bit clearly wasn't well thought out.
Another quirk is that it only saves at fixed locations which are spaced far apart. This is annoying since the game crashes frequently (I'm running Windows 7) forcing me to start over. 6.5/10

It pains me to give this a game a thumbs-down, it really does, but after 10 hours in, there is just so much fundamentally broken about this game that I can only recommend that people give it a wide berth until the developer finally sorts out the myriad problems with it.

It's a shame, really, because the game's handdrawn graphics are astoundingly beautiful, the soundtrack is wonderful, and its setting is startlingly original. Seriously, how many games do you see set in Aztec-era Mexico?

For the first 10 levels, you tend to be tolerant with the game, because the bugs don't manifest themselves, progression is fairly linear, you expect the somewhat sloppy combat system to improve as you gain skills, and it's just so damn beautiful. The problem is that after that, things start going downhill very quickly.

The game has a hair-tearingly annoying autosave system that saves after each level, and also records quest errors and bugs that cause you to fall into an infinitely deep hole. The combat is atrocious, and eventually devolves into using somersaults to scrape past powerful opponents in a desperate attempt to maintain some kind of combat strategy. Quest texts are misleading and often lead into dead ends, which you often cannot find your way out of without much backtracking, trial and error and - in some cases - a walkthrough.

Compounding these problems is an appallingly bad energy system, which requires you to go hunting for various types of 'energy' to pass certain obstacles. Some - the green 'vital' energy and the white 'divine' energy - are fairly regular occurrences - the others, like the gold 'elemental' energy, force you on an arduous wild goose chase with only a vague idea of how to find said energy.

And that's not to mention some of the possibly worst design decisions ever to be committed to a game - I will simply say "monkey cave" and "gap", which will probably evoke similar traumatic memories in fellow players.

Not bad, not bad at all. I don't often see games with an Aztec-themed setting, and this one is nicely done.

The game sets you as a young descendant of the sun god, and with the help of a spell-caster trapped in hummingbird form, you set out to recover seven phonograms and destroy an evil god that is causing havok in the area. The writing isn't too deep, but it's decent and enjoyable, as is the gameplay.

Aztaka is a sidescrolling RPG platformer, meaning you're going to be doing a lot of running left and right and jumping on things, with the addition of buying or otherwise acquiring skills, spells, and equipment. The spells themselves are kind of interesting as they are not cast with a button press. You have to select the spell and then click a series of buttons in a patterned sequence to set it off. In addition, there are four types of energy that can be collected and used to heal yourself, replenish MP, or interact with the world in certain ways. For example, the one that heals you can also grow tree limbs, which you can use to access higher places or equipment and skill drops just out of reach.

The rate at which you gain new skills and spells is pretty well-balanced, coming in at a decent rate, though to be honest I found most of them to be of limited use. Certainly by the end I was pretty much Superman; any damage I took healed almost as soon as I got it, allowing me to practically curb-stomp everything up to and including the final boss. However, that was near the end and was quite fun by that point.

As for artistic design, the painted backgrounds are gorgeously detailed, and the 3D characters and enemies generally work well and don't clash badly, outside of flies which look a bit more pasted in. The music is fantastic, the perfect feel, blending everything together.

There are a few complaints, though nothing horrible. The biggest is certainly wall-jumping, an acquired skill that is needed to access crucial parts of the game. The help description is inadequate at best, leading to a great deal of frustration until you either figure it out on your own or someone walks you through it (hint: jump at and touch the wall, then jump without using directional keys, hitting jump as you touch each successive wall).

The text-only game ending was also a little bit of a letdown, though to be honest what it described would have probably taken a good deal more resources to show.

All in all, this was for me a quite enjoyable game I don't have problems recommending.