The Gold of the Aztecs

The Gold of the Aztecs is an action-adventure created by Kinetica and published by U.S. Gold in 1990 for the Amiga, Atari ST, and MS-DOS.

The game is set in Mexico. The hero, a sort of Indiana Jones called Brett Conrad, must find an Aztec temple thanks to an old Spanish map he found somewhere. Screen after screen, he has to defeat several enemies and avoid the dangers. The game is similar to Obliterator and Barbarian by Psygnosis. It also has similarities with Colorado by Silmarils. Like those titles, the game is divided into single screens, each designed with beautiful graphics. The hero can use several objects, shown at the bottom of the screen. Each time you change an item, you will see an excellent animation. For example, Brett will put the previous one into a pocket and extract the new one. You can see that the developers put a lot of attention into designing all the animations, frame by frame. The effect is nice, sometimes excessive, which gives a light tone, almost humorous, to the game. The range of movements of the hero is impressive; for each object, he can do many different actions. Apparently, more than 140 character movement was designed.

Unfortunately, what I just said about the animations, is not valid for the gameplay. Controls are not responsive and relatively slow, which makes the game very difficult unless you are an arcade champion.

Anyway, at least the graphics, animations, and overall atmosphere are worth some minutes of play. But I know people that have finished this game, so if you never ended it, maybe now it's time to try again.