Aztecs: The Last Sun is a survival city‑builder that casts players as the Tlatoani, the divine ruler charged with raising Tenochtitlán from the marshes of Lake Texcoco and keeping the sun from fading. Combining territorial terraforming, layered production chains, ritual mechanics and a night‑time threat driven by mythic forces, the game blends traditional settlement management with moral choices and tense survival loops. The PC Early Access version published by Toplitz and developed by Play2Chill shows a distinct identity: part historical fantasia, part punishing resource puzzle, all framed by a mythic story campaign.
What we know
Aztecs: The Last Sun is a PC Early Access title from Play2Chill and Toplitz that places city‑building at the centre of a survival story rooted in Aztec history and mythology. Players build and expand Tenochtitlán across reclaimed land and canals, with more than two dozen building types and multiple upgrade paths designed to support production chains, research and civic growth. Terraforming the lake, constructing temples and academies, dispatching expeditions, and establishing trade routes are part of the strategic layer, while an overarching narrative campaign ties player choices to consequences. Nights bring a supernatural threat led by a Moon Goddess whose assaults force players to perform rituals, make harsh moral decisions about captives, and sometimes use human sacrifice as a mechanic to keep a divine shield intact. The Early Access build on PC emphasizes community feedback, promises further regions, systems and QoL improvements before 1.0, and ships with modest system requirements aimed at 1080p/60FPS for recommended hardware.
What we saw
We played the Early Access PC build provided by the developers, spending multiple sessions building initial settlements, experimenting with terraforming and canal work, trialling the ritual systems and surviving successive night invasions; our hands‑on time included both sandbox survival runs and the opening chapters of the story campaign, giving us a cross‑section of the game’s mechanical and narrative ambitions.
What we thought
Aztecs: The Last Sun makes an arresting first impression through its combination of familiar city‑builder plumbing and an uncommonly dark survival conceit. The act of reshaping marshland into productive islands is satisfying and tactile: canals, causeways and reclaimed plots feel meaningful because they directly affect logistics and where you can place monuments and farms. When the economy hums, the city grows into something recognisably grand, and the promise of temples and academies as long‑term investments gives the midgame tangible goals.
That same bold mixture of genres is also the game’s most divisive trait. Turning night into a recurring, punishing survival challenge injects tension but also interrupts the city‑planning flow in ways that can feel abrupt. Rituals and the moral weight of sacrifices are implemented as game systems that force choices with clear mechanical payoffs, which creates memorable moments but occasionally brushes against tonal awkwardness when real‑world cultural practices are abstracted into resource sinks. This balance between meaningful, difficult choices and systems that feel like artificial gates will likely evolve with community feedback.
Controls and interface are serviceable but show room for refinement. Navigation, building placement and production routing work well enough in the current build, yet resource management screens and information density can overwhelm in larger settlements; clearer tooltips and improved visual feedback for supply lines would reduce the friction that surfaced in our play sessions. The game’s AI and pathing held up for most scenarios, though a few edge cases, like having crowded canals or overburdened labor pools, led to awkward traffic that broke immersion.
Visually and aurally, the Early Access build is evocative. The art direction leans into a stylised, atmospheric palette that highlights stone monuments, reed structures and the reflective water of Texcoco, while the audio design underscores nights with unsettling, ceremonial tones that raise stakes effectively. Performance has been stable on recommended hardware during our time with the build, and the developers’ openness about Early Access roadmaps suggests many of the UX rough edges and systemic expansions will be addressed. As it stands, Aztecs: The Last Sun is an ambitious, characterful hybrid that already offers compelling choices and emergent stories, but it will need polishing and careful tuning to make its harsher systems feel fair rather than punitive.
Press Play Media 