Ara: History Untold Review

4X games have come a long way since their first releases. With newer games delving more into innovation, the genre seems livelier than ever. While Sid Meier's Civilization is still hailed as a nearly undisputed king of the genre, many games attempt to supplant or at least compete with it.

One such game is Ara: History Untold. Very reminiscent of its 4X predecessors, it was developed by Oxide Games and published by Xbox Game Studios. As mentioned, it is not too different from other 4X games like Humankind or the Civilization series.

This is evident by the style of its leaders, who stem from many historical characters. There are quite a few of them, each with unique abilities and bonuses they offer. There is a range between the likes of George Washington and Shaka Zulu and more unknown figures like Sappho, Tamar, and Ram Khamhaeng. It also has a few odd choices thrown in as well. Figures such as Hildegard von Bingen, Sappho, and Howard Florey definitely aren't leaders in the conventional term, yet they still find a way to work well in the game.

 Ara: History Untold has a few different difficulties and more than a few different types of maps. It also allows you to determine. Before starting, you will also notice that, unlike the vast majority of 4X games,  Ara: History Untold's map is split into regions of varying sizes and shapes. Ditching the hex-based map makes things far more refreshing and a good addition. 

The game starts in the Neolithic age, with a tiny city and a scout. The scout moves around and explores other regions, revealing surrounding regions. At the start of the game, only your surrounding regions are revealed; the rest are shrouded in a fog of war. Your scout can interact with various points of interest, letting you truly explore the map. The scout in  Ara: History Untold can find wild animals, resources, and leftovers from long-lost civilizations. 

Clicking on your starting city, you can see its growth, an overview of resource production, and the quality of life within the city. You can also see the zones within the city, where you can place different buildings.

In  Ara: History Untold, the basic resources are Food, Wealth, Timber, and Materials. You also have advanced resources like Research, Reserves, and Goods. These are produced by the various buildings you have access to, and these buildings can have different items used to improve them, such as Ploughs and Fertilizers for farms. The buildings can also have different 'experts' assigned to them, bringing in extra yields at the cost of maintenance.

Over time, your city will 'grow', in the sense that it will start to increase in its tier. This is mainly determined by the population, so as your population increases, its tier grows. At each tier, you will unlock newer things like claims, research, city production, amenities, etc. Amenities are crafted and used to further improve your city.

 Ara: History Untold gives you access to five quality-of-life categories: Happiness, Health, Knowledge, Prosperity, and Security. Happiness increases city production, Health boosts population growth, Knowledge gives you more 'Research' per turn, Prosperity gives you more taxes each turn, and Security boosts military readiness.

Each action you do contributes to adding prestige. Prestige is split into a few domains: Military, Commerce, Government, Religion, Culture, Science, Industry, and Impact. You can eventually claim regions as you increase your city tier, giving you access to new areas to build and more resources to exploit. 

In Ara: History Untold, these regions will have special resources, like crops, animals, and so on, that will further boost your production of a certain resource if you build on them. It is somewhat annoying that expansion is restricted by just one method of continuously claiming surrounding regions, so you will be restricted in your expansion when in between city tiers.

Another method of expansion in Ara: History Untold is to build a new city; to do that, you need to build settlers and send them to the region where you want to establish a new city. The number of cities you can have is limited, but that can be increased through improvements.

Ara: History Untold is split into 4 different acts, with each Act having 4 different eras. The acts only progress when a certain number of nations have reached a specific era. Once you reach a new act, the nations that have failed to have the necessary amount of prestige are 'lost to time,' ending their game. If multiple nations persist through all the acts, the nation with the highest prestige wins.

As mentioned, the game gives you prestige for pretty much any reason, so you don't need to dedicate yourself to a specific playstyle to win. You can do it via conquest, research, culture, and more. 

Throughout your game, you will encounter a number of events; these will tell you a story, giving a small historical fact that inspired it and giving you options to respond. Each gives you some bonuses and some consequences. You can also just choose to ignore the events. 

You might encounter different neutral tribes as you explore the map; they can range from very hostile to moderately friendly. Some events and goods will let you improve your relations with them, and eventually, they will join you.

The tech tree in  Ara: History Untold depends on that era system, allowing you to freely research the technologies allowed in an era. However, once you research enough prerequisite techs, you will get access to the 'Era Catalyst,' which lets you progress into the next Era. This also means you will be locked out of the technologies you haven't researched, so do it with some thought.

You will, however, be able to unlock most buildings and units through various technologies available in multiple eras of the game. At higher difficulties, you need to weigh the consequences of trying to get all the technologies instead of moving to the next Era. This presents a nice little niche layer of difficulty you see on multiple occasions of the game. Do note that in the game, the main type of buildings is called 'improvements.'

These improvements can be upgraded, usually after unlocking technologies or reaching a specific era. Improvements are your producers; they create tools, items, amenities, and resources. Naturally, some improvements are better placed in certain places.

In addition to the game's 'improvement' buildings, you also have access to the triumphs, which are essentially the Ara: History Untold's Wonders. While each region has multiple zones, it can house multiple improvements. Depending on the zone, you can only have a single triumph in a zone, which will take up all the space in that specific zone. 

There are also three other types of 'buildings' in the game. Two of them are 'specialists', and 'units'. Both are people you recruit to augment your improvements or fight with. The final building type is the 'Special Project.'

Ara: History Untold also lets you deal with more historical figures by allowing you to recruit paragons. These paragons are basically your advisors and military commanders. They provide various buffs and can also craft masterpieces. Paragons are excellent at augmenting city armies or just for good old prestige generation.

Ara: History Untold does a poor job of working with all its buildings with so many options available and 5 different types being offered. All the while, you can upgrade them, add items to them, and assign specialists. You can hyper-specialize buildings, but you'll often not bother or pick a random one. The organization of the buildings feels clunky at times, overwhelming you with information and options.

The religion design of the game lets you pick 'Religious Verses,' which are also a form of buffs. And that's it. It's just a reskinned way of providing buffs; you don't get to engage with it anymore. Your religion will spread on its own, and you can see its propagation, but you cannot interact with it, so it's left as a cool idea but not very fleshed out.

Aside from the base resources, you have access to more than 80 different resources that you can produce or harvest from various points around the map. The extreme and absurd amount of detail the game works with, with its layers of items, crafting, and so on, starts to break the game down a little, especially when many of them have little logic in them and are just there to add complexity to the game. 

At lower difficulties, it is a mild annoyance; at higher ones, Ara: History Untold starts to become a nightmare. Credit where it's due; the system makes things incredibly detailed and in-depth, but in a 4X nation-builder, micromanaging every little building will get annoying.

The diplomacy system also suffers, but in the opposite way. Like the religion system, you don't get to do much with diplomacy, except for maybe trading goods. This is nice since, with over a hundred goods, you will probably need to get some from trade. The diplomacy system lets you give gifts, commit to trade, have a research agreement, or form alliances, but all of these are wildly variable since the AI seemingly plays like a madman.

The diplomacy system is extremely unfun, and you will often find yourself disregarding it. The first Act's tribes are much more fun to interact with, even though that, too, is limited. As for the events, they are far and few in between, and at many points, you will forget they even existed. 

The combat system isn't too much to behold, but that's a good thing in certain cases. Once built, your units stay in 'reserves', and you can deploy them for battles and wars. Once deployed, the units can't be sent back to the reserves, so you have to have a good number of resources since a lot of these units have high upkeep. One thing missing from the game is its complete lack of unit upgrades, so once you get a unit, you're stuck with it until you delete it or it dies.

The game is also truly beautiful to look at. It has a pretty art style accompanied by absurd amounts of detail. Ara: History Untold offers players the thing many beg for in other games—an ability to zoom in and see the city and its people. Your city has various buildings full of people walking around and living their lives. The game also runs smoothly, with turns passing by in the blink of an eye.

On a side note, the Startup introduction is one of the coolest ones you can find in the market, with incredibly smooth transitions. The battle animations are really nice to look at, and the video option lets you choose whether or not to see them. 

Ara: History Untold's UI is incredibly similar to the Civilization games, and much like that game, it is well-designed in terms of its use. However, it also feels a bit overbearing, throwing lots of things at you, especially in the various tabs that can pop up from interactions. The opaque design and the colors have some charm. However, they still leave you in an uncanny valley of cartoonish seriousness. The controls, however, remain intuitive and well-made, with tons of accessibility options to let you craft your experience.

The music is also a strong point. It's neither overdone nor underdone, setting a balance of tones and themes. The announcer's narration adds to the game, but overall, like many other things, it doesn't leave too much to be said. It's a strong point, but here, a lot of the strong points are just 'gets the job done.'

A place where the game excels is representing history; any history buff will immediately be happy at the wide cast of figures used, especially for far lesser-known periods and regions. The Paragons, events, and leaders all make you want to know more about the world, and it shows how much work went into doing the research. 

Ara: History Untold is a surprisingly tempting turn-based strategy; it brings in a lot of ideas, really good ones at that. But it also leaves you feeling a strange sensation of emptiness. The game has a lot of content, but much of it is not fleshed out. It's a great game, but it also has many issues. It does a lot of things right but has equal amounts of drawbacks to counteract that. 

Ara: History Untold has a set of great ideas, but many of its systems lack proper implementation. It's a great 4X strategy game that you will often mistake for being made by an Indie Studio or still being in Early Access. But as you play, especially as a genre fan, you will stay hooked despite its misgivings.