Aztecs: The Last Sun

Devs have officially abandoned it. No further updates. Don't buy it.

I wanted to like this game so much more. The mechanic of sacrificing citizens and captives in order to form your blood zone sounds super unique! But in practice you just get a influx of captives every few days from trade, and it becomes nothing more than a afterthought. There are only 2 nightly random events, making the day night cycle feel repetitive. Unless you know what city to rush with explorers you WILL lose. This first discovery is required to start your only source of slave income. The game wants you to replay over and over to learn the mechanics, but there is no map or world randomization. This leads to an AWFUL replayability experience as you feel like you are building the same colony 30 times rather than having unique geographical challenges to conquor. The tech tree is a glorified 2 tier upgrade system. You don't progress through the stages in any meaningful way, and effectively have access to end game research from the start of the game. Additionally the tech tree is bloated with upgrades that all boil down to (make more resources) while only 1/4th of the upgrades actually unlock a new structure. For a city building game it is very bare bones The game has potential, but I would NOT spend your money on this game. Come back in a year after a few updates and there will be something much better here for you

The overall premise of the game is solid: a fallen Aztec society, struggling to rebuild with oppressive outside forces holding you back. If that were actually the game, that'd be great, but the real game feels like: click the right buttons in the right order to win. Let me give a very simple example: the very beginning of the game tells you "evil is coming, we have to defend" but, as it turns out, you can just ignore that entirely and build as much as you want (really: as much as you can) because there is not actually any pressure. This may be the only point in the game you get to decide what you, the player, want to do. You have a limited resource that only begins generating after the early setup phase, but before that you actually have a good bit of freedom to think and build your city the way you want. After that, you have a bunch of things that will happen to you, mostly without your input, and be forced to deal with in an extremely linear way. Research "choices" feel like a facade: you have to research things in a specific order otherwise you run into a cascade of failure conditions. Maybe you want more food - that's sensible, but you don't have the resources (or population) to support that. Even if you did, that doesn't matter because the nightly bombardment is forcing you down the quickest possible path to get some amount of reproducible blood (your only defensive mechanic). Do you want to decide how to build your city? That's unfortunate because refugees are being forced onto you very early, and you can't just ignore them because you don't have any other way of increasing your workforce, even though they show up earlier than you'll be ready for. Now you're running out of food (which is okay, disease will become a problem first but you built a medical center during the game's prologue right? No? Oof, well it's one of the few techs initially unlocked and you had the whole prologue to build it, now you're going to suffer through ineffective workers (fun fact: them being sick doesn't remove them from work, you have to manually reduce and then manually increment the workforce to get a new person even if you have dozens or more people doing nothing when someone is sick and refusing to work). The game introduces a fun mechanic: give the merchant some gold and he'll give you slaves you can turn into blood. Slightly macabre, but aligned for an Aztec game. Unfortunately despite building all the infrastructure to get gold (it's 2 chunks of research, which aren't easy or cheap on their own) it's then...useless! You get the slaves once, sacrifice them, then the merchant has decided to just skip town. All of your gold now is meaningless until you: 1. Get the story event to build the exploration building 2. Research it 3. Start Exploring! 4. But oh no, to actually really progress, you need a different kind of building. 5. Realize you need a new material type (Wood -> planks) 6. Research that 7. Build the workshop 8. Accumulate resources 9. Build the second exploration building 10. Send your people out to finally explore. Did you think you're done here? That'd be great, it's not how the game goes. 11. Now your original explorers have to go do another set of exploration (I think it's at least 2 nodes, maybe more) 12. Finally you discover a city you can trade with, HOORAY! 13. But you need a port. Whatever you did with the merchant WAY earlier apparently didn't count. 14. Go research that. 15. Oof, sorry, right, you need a NEW material (Stone -> Bricks) to build it. 16. Research that. 17. Btw I really hope you're not starving with all the refugees forced onto you with no viable option to deal with them. I also hope the massive amount of time hasn't forced you into murdering your own people and sacrificing your reputation with the gods so you can survive just one more night. 18. At long last, if you played this right, you can build a port and start trading with that remote city. 19. But it's not like "I send X and get Y", they're pre-defined and time-gated options so I really hope you're not somehow behind on your economy (you will be) after this because that'd be really rough to handle. Earlier you might have looked at the tech tree and thought "oh maybe I should research farming" or "increase the sizes of my houses because I have all these refugees". There are a number of solid looking options but there's one mechanic that dominates the entire game: without blood you lose. Anything that doesn't work towards that goal is a loss condition. If you want a puzzle game that's dressed up as a city builder, this is an excellent choice. If you want a city builder though, I suspect you'll be quite disappointed.

Game had potential. Devs abandoned it almost immediately and left the product unfinished and unpolished. Do not recommend supporting the devs.

Oh how sad to downvote this game. On the paper it could be awesome! Could... But it is not. First of all the graphics are "functional". No eye candy at all... Then who made the decission that you need press always long time on a button to make the selection work? Why I need upgrade every building one by one and need go for it on a second page of the building menu!? Lastly it is boring. Sure a city builder can be "boring". Like the good old sim city... But this game is the bad boring. You not feel like you really achieve something new. You have so many things that slow you down, only for game extension. For me it is a rare case where I regret that I bought and am sad about the wasted money.

Devs abandoned this game. It's an unfinished bug mess.

Great concept, not executed well. Way too many game breaking bugs!

abandoned plain and simple