Aztaka Developer’s Edition

By: ithamore

On: January 26th, 2011

Earlier this month, Citérémis released a special Developer’s Edition of Aztaka, and it will be available for $9.99 (50% off the regular price) until the end of January. With the game, it includes the source code, the OST, and an art book.  Also, the demo has been trimmed down to 319 MB for those how haven’t tried it yet.

This special edition and discounted launch price is part of their initiative toward making the game profitable. Since May 2009, Aztaka has earned only 16% of the $235,000 that was borrowed to develop the game. So, this is a chance for some charitable game buying. It is also reminder to all indie developers wanting to break into commercial gaming that taking a large financial risks is risky and sometimes a gamble.

Sources: Citérémis and DIYgamer.

Aztaka

By: Derek Yu

On: June 24th, 2009

Aztaka came out on May 7th, and a demo was released a few weeks later. Despite looking like a rather large-scale and polished independent game with painted graphics, the game was released with relatively little fanfare. After playing through the demo recently, I can kind of understand why – though it has its bright moments, I found it to be lackluster overall. Most parts of the demo simply don’t reach quite far enough, or aren’t bold or coherent enough, to be considered great.

The game is a side-scrolling platform game that uses the mouse for attacking, manipulating the environment, and casting spells using a gesture-style system. You also use the mouse to drag around various energies that are left behind in the world, by fallen enemies and from other sources. These energies can be stored in containers or used to solve the majority of the demo’s puzzles. Along the way you can also level up, equip magic items, and drink potions, like in Diablo or other RPG-likes.

It has to be noted that of the demo’s 1.5 gigabytes (!), 800 megabytes are dedicated to the gigantic textures. The graphics are definitely one of the best features of the demo, although they can lack a certain vitality and coherency at times, especially with the characters and enemies. Overall, Aztaka looks pretty good, though, and the levels I played give a wonderful sense of scale, whether you’re running up a temple’s stairs with a vast jungle beneath you or spearing giant bugs deep in an underground cave.

Unfortunately, the overall design seems bland. The combat in the demo was about as dull as you might imagine a side-view version of Diablo to be, and can get unnecessarily frustrating, like when a giant beetle’s ass deals you multiple hits that each take off half your life and you have to restart a level from scratch! The story, which begins with a, in my opinion, very slow-moving and boring scrolling text prologue, doesn’t provide much impetus to move forward, either, and is surprisingly hard to follow at times, despite being simple at heart.

What keeps you going, of course, is the potential to get stronger, to obtain new abilities, items, and spells, and to see the new environments. And yeah, that can actually be enough – by the time the demo ran out (at the end of the Underground Passage), I was interested in playing more. Certainly, the demo got better as it went along, so I’m hopeful that the “Fun Factor” (to unabashedly steal a term from GamePro) continues heading in that direction in the full game ($24.95).

TIGdb: Entry for Aztaka