Aztez is a 2D Beat ’em up mixed in with some strategical 4X aspects on its over-world for good measure. It is set in the Aztec’s homeland of modern-day Mexico as both the Spanish and supernatural forces wreak havoc on their homeland. It is up to you to expand their empire and gather enough troops to contend with all of these external threats chipping away at the society they once knew. You start off with a single Aztez, which doubles as both an extra move in your turn and an extra life should you lose in combat if you have another. The choices at your disposal lie solely with the amount of gold you’ve gathered in order to pay agents to quash a rebellion, turn over a neutral city to your side, or summon one time cards that can have a wide array of effects.
All of those actions take gold and is a rich gets richer type of ordeal. Having enough cash to buy up a ton of cities will result in far higher tax revenues every turn and can help keep that snowball effect rolling until you own near everything. Every turn, multiple situations will pop up that require your attention. These can range from stopping a cult from bringing a hellish Darkness to the land, someone trying to sack your city or rob you, and a deadly infection that will spread if you don’t stop it, to name a few. Starting off, you only have a single Aztez, and that means you can only handle a single one of those problems while allowing the rest of those emergencies to come into being. This is a rougelite title, so all of this will be random. Depending on your luck, you can simply carry on doing well-paying missions and plundering loot, or you may find yourself immediately dealing with an apocalyptic scenario.
Trying to tackle a mission or situation is where things get interesting. You will be transported into a 2D view and given control of your character to fight whatever the threat may be. If it is just a bunch of conscripts causing trouble, you’ll face a couple of low threat foes. Meanwhile, a plague will have you beating a couple of defenseless sick people to death. Those are the best-case scenarios. There is no lack of things that want to kill you here, and you will be facing far more powerful opponents in just a few turns time. You will have mages that can blast off half of your health bar with a single magical spell, extremely agile monsters that spring through the air and dig down into the ground to avoid your attacks, and well-armored Spaniards wielding guns as a few examples. This is by no means an easy game, and you are as powerful as you are gonna get at the start. It is a skill-based game where your beat em up abilities are far more important than any 4X strategic experience you may have.
It features a deceptively simple combat system. You have two buttons to attack, neither featuring any advantage over the other, just different combos. It is not possible to string these two attacks into one another. Your goal is to mash one button to preform its preset combo for as long as possible. The simple part is attacking, what you will absolutely need to learn is when to break off a combo in order to block or get out of the way. As previously stated, a single attack can cause a tremendous amount of damage and you should avoid taking any unnecessary hits. These are not your Batman styled enemies, they will gladly all attack in rapid succession and attempt to overwhelm you. Worse still is that your foes can not damage one another and their attacks phase right through their comrades until hitting you, which is honestly pretty cheap, but does force you to pay attention to all of them.
Aside from your basic combo, you will find that attacking while holding a directional button will cause a unique effect. That unique effect and your combos solely depend on the type of weapon you choose to start with, but let’s talk about the starter sword. Holding down while attacking will let you go for a leg sweep as to throw an enemy off balance, and are also the only way to get at a foe with a shield. Pressing up will launch your opponent into the air, leaving him open for some aerial combos. In addition to their speed and damage, these unique factors significantly change up the gameplay when selecting different weapons. Using a slow, heavy-hitting Club with a simple three-hit combo will force you to adopt new methods of fighting. Attacking with it while holding down will not result in a leg sweep, but in you pounding the ground and a shockwave blasting through the enemy.
Finding out what all of the weapons do and how they handle is a great deal of fun. Over the course of the game, you can collect up to three other ones and switch them on the fly creating a world of opportunity in battle. Not all weapons have a low aimed attack to get past a shielded foe’s defenses, however. In those situations, you need to rely on your grab and mashing the attack button to do them in, until you get an additional weapon other than your starter. Doing that is a slow and boring process, making choosing certain weapons to start with a tough sell. Your character also has a dash ability that can be used either on the ground or in the air. When facing off against foes with guns, learning how to air dash will be your only hope of survival. You can not dodge or block bullets, which are only shot horizontally. With melee-based attacks, you can parry if you block just right and pay them back in full with a counterattack.
What really separates you from the rest of the combatants is your unique ability to cause all of the blood in the arena to fly towards you. It looks awesome to observe waves of your enemy’s blood rushing towards you, more so since the game is black and white, with blood being the only thing with color. Doing so will refill some of your health and fill up your God meter. Once that meter is filled up, you can active whatever god’s powers you have chosen at the press of a button. The one you always begin with is a simple push-back area of effect attack that causes a bit of damage but is mostly for getting some breathing room when swarmed by enemies. You can unlock three other new gods that offer powers such as refilling half of your health or causing a nearby enemy massive damage. Gathering up blood is a slow process however, so you must be careful when you choose to do so least you take a spear to the gut.
Dying is a massive deal. Even if it appears like a simple mission, you should be on alert as one screw-up can see you losing an Aztez. That means you will have one less person to handle the plethora of issues that keep popping up all over your empire. Getting more of them is entirely random, so you are at the RNGs mercy. There is a single time you can reliably get a new Aztez by expanding your empire enough at the start. I am not aware of another surefire way to get another if there is one. Festival quests are religious combat events to earn rewards and are the only ones that don’t result in your death when lost. A great way to get rewards such as gold and cards is to complete a mission’s secondary quest. Many quests have no payoff for completing your primary objective, other than preventing a drought or something, making risking yourself for a reward that much more tempting. These secondary objectives are randomized for all situations and include simple things like beating it in a time limit or performing a certain number of parries.
The bad thing of them being randomized is that some will be literally impossible to complete, like filling up your god meter three times over when only facing a few enemies. Something I failed to mention is that you can execute wounded opponents in quite a violent fashion, which results in more blood being spilled for your later use. These take a couple of seconds to carry out, and you are not impervious to damage in this execution animation. It is a risk and reward type of ordeal as you can just as easily find yourself on the receiving end of a beating by that man’s comrades. Combat has a lot of depth to it that may not be all that evident at a glance. Also worth mentioning is that this title will not let you try to abuse quitting and reloading to get things going your way. It auto-saves frequently, and leaving the game in a battle will cause it to assume you lost then kill off your Aztez.
Cards you gain by either summoning with an agent or randomly earning from completing a secondary objective will net you a bit of leeway from all the chaos in the overworld. They can do things such as causing stacks of gold to appear before a Spaniard invasion party, temporarily causing them to stop marching towards you. You can send an Aztez to hell itself in the hopes of finding good loot, or you can increase the population of a city, which equates to more taxes. All of them only have passive effects or something to briefly delay the inevitable, you will always have to defend yourself in 2D combat despite your best efforts. It would be best if you went into this seeing it as a Beat em Up with 4X aspects, not the other way around.
You will have to get pretty good at the fighting in order to complete it, as it is relentlessly brutal later on. There is no win condition in where you can merely turtle in and not send your Aztez warriors into danger, despite possibly only having a single one left. It is a highly skilled based beat em up game where you are as strong as you are going to get right from the start, and the rest is down to your personal ability. There is a mode to practice against any enemy types of your choice and another that cuts out the 4X bits to offer short battle missions. These help give you enough practice to get you up to snuff to face both the Spanish and the Darkness. Aztez is a game that is hard to put down once you pick it up due to the fast, fluid combat. While the 4X parts are a bit shallow, they are still ultimately enjoyable as you freak out over how much RNG seems to hate you today. I had a blast with Aztez. It is well worth considering for those looking for a unique Beat ’em up that will give them a run for their money.
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