Tlatoani: Aztec Cities

I really love city builders and was super excited to have an old-school one set in meso-america. But this game feels underbaked. The tutorials are underdeveloped for the number and complexity of different systems. The first couple missions are not too bad. By the fourth campaign mission, the game is providing additional mechanics (trading posts & docks, levies as tribute, religious management, land reclamation via chinampas, water distribution via cisterns and aqueducts) with barely any explanation of how they work. I also wish the game had a better in-game encyclopedia. For example, in one mission I was trying to upgrade housing to improved housing types. But there is no where in game to reference what the tiers of housing are (do I need to get through 2 upgrades? 4 upgrades?) and which resources each tier requires in order for that upgrade to happen. EDITED: Initially, I believed the missions did not have difficulty levels that could be adjusted by the player. The developer responded that this was a feature of the game. I confirmed this. The UI in mission set-up could use some work to make it more obvious which aspects of mission set-up are customizable.

I really wanted to like this game. Even if you play the full tutorial, nothing will ever work right. This game is fundamentally broken. Everytime I play this game, there is some new issue that makes absolutely no sense. The game just doesnt work. I kind of love the concept of this game so much, but it honestly deserved no marketing. Maybe finish the game before release. That's kind of what indies are supposed to do. This isn't 1.0 for anyone lured by the sale like me.

I really want to like this game, because it feels like the underlying systems are solid and the setting is really interesting... but the presentation is just awful. Why are all the UI assets tiny and blurry or jaggy? It looks like this game was made in 2005 and I'm supposed to be playing in 480p or something. But then the icons are also really complicated, so it's hard to tell what they're even supposed to be, even with the UI scaled up I keep having to lean close to my monitor and squint. The whole game feels like it lacks solid UX design. Opening the Settings menu reinforces this, it really felt like the game just said "yeah, we couldn't decide what our game should be like, so why don't you choose?" The fact you can just change color correction or sprite coloration and scales, and entirely change the look of the game is WILD; I appreciate settings that give you freedom, but this seems like too much... The tutorial is, somehow, both too restrictive and doesn't explain things well enough. It goes over step by step what you need to do, but only briefly; and then it tells you to read an encyclopedia to learn more, which is not ideal. But then the actual tutorial steps are sometimes oddly restrictive: "Yes, we told you you can use porters to move resources around, but you HAVE to put your kilns next to your clay pits, and no you are not allowed to progress unless you do!" But on the flip side I feel like a lot of players will just do exactly as the game instructs, blindly plopping buildings down where the arrows are pointed, and not learn much about how things actually work. Frankly this should still be in Early Access. It feels like they just released a beta that has all the systems in place, but still needs like 6 months work to get polished up.

Faithful recreation of Sierra city builders experience in mesoamerican dressing with more modern mechanics. Gameplay is captivating from the start and not too obnoxious on the logistics like Nebuchadnezzar, actual Sierra games or other games of sort. Most required information and mechanics to actually produce a good looking and functioning city is present. Certainly a commended game.

It's dead don't buy it

It,s already dead and buried.Dont bother with it,its to bad,concept was neat,but needed so much more work.

YES! I was just on an Aztec history binge when I saw this game, and I was also a HUGE Caesar III fan. This marries those just like you'd expect! If you remember and enjoyed it, have a soft spot for Aztec history and lore, then this is the game. It doesn't try to reinvent the wheel. The graphics are simple but very clean. It feels like playing a modern remaster of a win95/DOS game, and I mean that in a very good way. The only marks I have against it are minor. Probably my least favorite thing is Chinampas are not historically accurate. The first blind city I queued up, I was dropping them down thinking they were going to feed my people. Chinampas are not used to grow food like the Aztec did. The game uses them to reclaim swamp land. Hint hint... add some more chinampa types in addition to the "reclaim chinampa" All you need is to make the existing crops placeable on shallow water, and modify the sprite so it looks like a floating rectangle that can be locked together. Make the sprite of people managing them a person in a canoe. You don't know Aztec history well enough to make something like this and that not be an intentional design choice, but it would level up the immersion SO MUCH MORE if there were chinampa crop options. I get why we don't get to be Tenochtitlan, but if we can be Xochimilco, we NEED real chinampas. 😉 Also let citizens use the canals and lakes for faster travel by canoe would be AWESOME. Two more minor things that I also understand from a design perspective that would help move this game from "great" to "godhood." It recycles the same sprite for every direction the camera turns. I never rotate, but if I ever do, the buildings not rotating with the camera is disorienting. I understand this means 4x the sprites for literally everything and a substantially larger install size, but it would be worth it. Again, minor. On that same note of immersion vs file size, one thing I miss from Caesar III is the character voiceovers. You click characters here and it is just silence. Again, would make the game a lot bigger with hundreds of lines of voice, but as long as it was with a decent TTS model, I wouldn't mind some Nahuatl words, phrases, expressions run into AI if it gave me the immersive feedback from my citizens like Caesar III did. There are people who still speak Nahuatl. It is not a dead language (the Spanish tried). They would probably record great authentic voiceovers for nothing.