Ara: History Untold - A New 4X Strategy Game Challenges the Genre

Ara: History Untold Review - All or Nothing

Ara: History Untold is an odd game. I don't quite know how it fits into the Oxide Games' mission of "building great games that no one else dares to create" since I wouldn't say this is a game others wouldn't dare to create; it is, after all, not overly dissimilar to Civilization, Humankind, Old World, and more. That isn't to say it doesn't go beyond other games in the genre or do things a little differently because it does. Sometimes, it's for the better, but other things remind me of the fable of Icarus and not writing into Jim'll Fix It. I want to start with what I think is the best game design choice of Ara: History Untold, and that's the move from a hex-based map that almost every other 4X game uses to a region-based map. When you settle or expand, you expand into a region. Each region may have anything from two to five areas within it where you can build something, and those areas may have a natural resource, where a specific structure will let you utilise the resource. It looks great and feels organic enough, but a part of my brain doesn't shut up when it doesn't look like an actual city. There is one thing, though: the resources make this game of micromanagement central. There are too many resources; that's the be-all and end-all. From the resources on the map, which you harvest, to the ones further down the supply chain, it becomes a bit too much, particularly when you're digging around for a structure that manufactures the resource you want for a particular building or unit, but that becomes finicky in itself, particularly when you've got multiple cities, and they're starting to sprawl out. You could always go into each city and filter through the menus to find the specific type of production building you want, but this still means you'll need to swap and change. My major issue lies in what I see as a breaking of the realism they're going for; when I last checked, a workshop can make more than one item. You can queue items for some added ease, but that still relies on knowing precisely what you need and the exact structure when you unlock something new. On a positive note, this system forces you to specialise, which I always support. One city may be your "bread basket," while another can be an industrial powerhouse, with yet another being a cultural capital. You will need to have a little mix within your city boundaries. Cities don't like not having food, but a focus will be essential in some areas if you want to get the best out of your empire. I do have another complaint while I'm at it. The AI cheats, which I thought games had gotten out of. It seems to slow down, but they create new settlers early on at a rate I can't fathom. A settler costs 125 food; in two games, the AI had three cities (costing 250 food for the two settlers) before I even had the food to create one. They also tend to settle cities in the oddest places; later games - especially if you have many factions - look wrong, where cities are so far apart it would never work. On the AI's cities, I've also captured some that were built so poorly that they couldn't function when accountable to the rules set for players, yet the enemy managed to function, get an army out, and keep at it. I could be completely wrong, but I wouldn't mind betting on the AI evading such silly restrictions as "having enough food to feed your population." I'm not entirely sold on the AI in Ara: History Untold, is what I'm saying. More than city placement, I've had the AI randomly declare war on me, and this is a faction I've had next to no dealings with; one time, they were so far away that they never got the chance to send any troops before the time limit ran out. My mind may work differently, and I'm missing the master plan, but I don't quite think that's the case. It could also be that the game doesn't like having 36 factions at once. It's been mostly negative so far, but there are positives in the negatives and more to come. As I mentioned, the region system is fantastic, and despite my reservations over the sheer depth of the supply system and the number of items, I can't help but admire the aim. Going into more detail, each item you manufacture can also be used by a production building to benefit production. In the early stages, you can produce ploughs, which farms of all levels can use to improve food production if you select them as a supply item. Each building has various supply inputs to improve its output rate, and the later you go, the more inputs you have access to. Of course, I must reiterate that keeping track of everything is a management nightmare, even though the UI genuinely tries to help. I think a simplifying, where a workshop produced multiple, or all, items, would have been beneficial, but a fully realised supply system, including added benefits from putting a plough on a farm, truly adds to the game. Naturally, it also extends to the creation of military units. Want to train some cavalry? Not unless you have horses. But I shifted to the military because I wanted to talk about them, not about the building of them. What I like about the military aspect of Ara: History Until is the ability to recruit a sizable number into your reserves, which sit there ready for deployment. When you deploy them, it takes time for them to reach full strength, or you can rush to field a weakened army. You can also put them into formations, each with its benefits. At the start of a game, you can field a single unit or a formation of three. In the end, you can field a whole battalion of six units. Combat is akin to other 4X games in that the numbers decide what happens in the background. Two armies are in the same region, and the two armies fight it out, but you have no impact on the outcome beyond deciding which units to put in the formation. Though you can weaken units by using the abilities of others, archers, for example, can use indirect fire onto a neighbouring region and lightly damage enemies. Planes can bomb them. It adds depth and keeps combat interesting in a game that doesn't need combat. What do I mean by that? Well, Ara: History Untold doesn't have set victories in the Civilization sense, in that you have military victories, cultural victories, and so on. Whatever you do, there is a prestige cost or benefit - declaring war? It will cost prestige, and if you don't achieve your victory, that's a net negative. However, you may have a robust economy that keeps you high in the rankings, which is very important. Or maybe you have been focusing on your culture. You have successfully unlocked several advisors throughout the game; some have been used to boost production or your economy, but others are hard at work creating masterworks, like the Illiad, each adding to the prestige of your nation. You can also add to your collection of masterpieces by salvaging them from the remnants of lost nations, essentially becoming the game's version of the British Museum. Yes, this ancient Egyptian cartouche was created in London. After a certain number of nations reach a milestone (the end of a few ages in the technology tree), you move on to the second or third act. Once this happens, the bottom quarter of nations are wiped from the face of the earth. It's a bit jarring; one turn, they're there, and the next, there are ruins and remnants of roads everywhere; a quick decline rather than disappearance would have been better, but it's a system I like, particularly as you can see your ranking and act appropriately to secure or recover for the next act. It acts as an excellent way to bookmark a game, too. From founding and spreading your religion to building wonders, scientific advancement, or being a warlord and successfully attacking others, how you play Ara: History Untold isn't overly limited when trying to secure the overall victory. Other games have tried to make it so that you aren't forced down one path to varying degrees of success, but boiling down almost every action, and even the simple happiness of your nation, to prestige, works. There's so much I haven't touched upon in detail, such as the metrics of keeping a city happy; each building provides something, amenities give time-bound boosts, and you have to craft them. The religion system and how you develop and spread that. Even the visuals and audio, which I generally like to do a bit about. They're great, if you wondered. This review could likely go beyond the 1600+ words it's at already. There is a massive amount to do and balance. What most 4X games get in DLC, this has, and could likely build on. Ara: History Untold is the perfect example of a mixed bag. Some genuinely great ideas, but some negatives are trying to counterbalance them. Focusing on supply chains and adding real to is an excellent idea, but the implementation has left the game with significant micromanagement, which could put people off. The region and city development systems are on a whole new level and could be how 4X games go in the future, but the AI manages to mess it up. I must admit, when not writing this review, my brain kept saying, "I like this, but", and I'd decided that I was leaning towards around a score of six and a half, but putting everything on paper and playing more, I was wrong. Ara: History Untold is a genuinely good 4X strategy game, but it has its issues. If you like the genre, you will like this. If you want a 4X with even more added depth, this will tickle your pleasure zones. I fully intend to play it more. Copy provided by the publisher. Ara: History Untold is a highly ambitious 4X game that looks to branch out and add even more depth to an already detailed genre. In many ways, it succeeds, bringing in a map and city-building system that far surpasses others in the genre and successfully interlinking practically every area. However, with some successes come issues, with the added depth in the supply chain making it a bit of a micromanagement nightmare; it tries to alleviate some of these issues with a user-friendly UI, but it could be a sticking point for some. The AI also seems to go on the fritz and break the game's rules.

Ara: History Untold Review - IGN

Ara: History Untold is the latest in a procession of turn-based 4X games trying to settle on the once-sovereign territory of Sid Meier's Civilization, and it's one of the more competent challengers to do so. The liveliness and detail of its animated towns and cities never fail to delight me - as a historical ant farm, at least. But it expects more of us as a world leader than Civ ever has, and doesn't really provide us with the tools to make it truly feel good to be the king. On a basic level, Ara doesn't have a vastly different view of history from its 4X forebears. Starting from roughly Neolithic times, you race down a tech tree split up into three acts of four ages each along a familiar and narrow path based mostly on Europe and its colonial offshoots. One little twist I did appreciate is that the final, futuristic era has a lot more to do with general AI, transhumanism, and cybernetics than going to space, which I think is a necessary and likely step on the path ahead of us that often gets skipped over in favor of interstellar travel. Much like Civ, Ara lets you select from an array of historical leaders who appear in a simple but expressive 3D style. Alongside familiar faces like Caesar and Shaka Zulu, we also get some less conventional "rulers" like Copernicus for Poland and Sappho for Greece, which is a nice touch. Their bonuses are all underwhelmingly passive, though. None of them can really do anything the others can't. And there are no culturally unique units - at least, not from your leader choice. You can unlock a couple wildcards, like Berserkers from building a brewery, but they're available to anyone who meets the right conditions. There's also a system of opposing personality traits that maybe could have been interesting, because it does affect how other leaders will initially view you diplomatically, but I didn't find it to be that impactful. Also, some of them provide a negative modifier with no upside, which seems very strange from a balance perspective, since the leaders who have them don't seem to get anything to make up for this. Ara's procedurally-generated worlds are positively enthralling to look at. Everything from trees to houses are rendered at a much smaller scale than in other, similar games, which makes the world feel larger and more authentic. Every town square, windmill, and even herd of wild animals is fully animated, bringing liveliness to every corner of the map. I honestly enjoy the simple act of panning around, watching my people go about their lives. It's not all great, though. Road-building, which is fully automated, tends to make these nonsensical tangles with too many sharp angles to look organic. You could argue this is to simulate real-world traffic engineering debacles, but it doesn't look nice compared to everything else. Performance can also get a little bit iffy in the late game, at least on the largest map size. The more of the fog I lifted, the more frames I lost, even on a 4070 Super GPU. We never quite reached slideshow territory, but I did end up having to turn some settings down in the last 100 turns or so. I was also a little disappointed that there isn't much difference in architecture other than which era you're in. At least judging by the civs I played, it seems like a farm or a residential neighborhood for any given time period looks about the same no matter who built it. And this just further reinforces the feeling that your leader choice is little more than a set of numerical bonuses. Where Ara almost literally grinds to a halt is also its most interesting gameplay innovation. While food, gold, science, and production - the usual gang - are all here, Ara features a very in-depth, goods-based manufacturing economy. You can harvest grain, which can then be made into bread at a bakery, which can then be used as an ingredient in gourmet meals at an inn. This continues all the way up to things like refrigerators and game consoles in the later eras. You can either spend these goods as a one-time cost to slot them into a specific building's inventory, like adding plows to a farm to increase its productivity, or consume them as amenities in your city-center for a temporary benefit. In theory, I like this a lot. In bigger settlements, simply producing the generic "food" resource will eventually become insufficient to feed the masses. But if you refine your crops into grain stores and preserves, and produce enough to keep those amenity slots full on an ongoing basis, you can grow much larger. Most manufactured goods also have multiple options for what you can make them with, including just spending gold if you don't have access to the base resources. I really liked the decision-making and economic planning involved here at smaller scales. The problem is that this becomes a nightmare to manage with even two or three fair-sized cities. There's no notification I could find or enable for when a city has a free amenity slot, for example. Nor when I could potentially fill an empty supplies slot on a production building, or swap out those supplies with a better option I had recently unlocked through technology. It also won't warn you when you have idle experts - Ara's version of specialists from Civ, who appear as your population increases and can be slotted to supercharge specific buildings. There's not even a really convenient way to keep track of your economy. There is a tooltip that will show you a basic balance sheet of everything you're producing and consuming, but it's too small, there's no way to sort the rows by anything but alphabetical order, and it eventually fills up with so many types of goods that it becomes overwhelming. Or you can look at a grid view, which is a bit easier to navigate, but doesn't include the spreadsheet and still can't be sorted. To really optimize my economy, I had to open dozens of individual building menus every time I unlocked a new tech or gained access to a new type of tools. And since this is essentially the core mechanic in Ara, everything else starts to collapse around it. The late game really gets to be a tedious slog, unless you pull far enough ahead that you can simply stop caring about most of the mechanics, which is what eventually happened to me on the default difficulty. Combat is fine. It's very automatic, with some rock-paper-scissors unit choices and unlockable formations that can give you modest bonuses based on the types of troops you have access to, adding a little bit of tactical decision-making. Engagements play out in full 3D, which is neat to watch the first few times as potentially hundreds of troops clash, but these animations lost their appeal for me fairly quickly since they're not especially dynamic. Ara also includes a knockout mechanic, which is something I'm generally not a fan of. After a certain number of players have reached Age 5 and Age 9, the ones with the least accumulated Prestige - your overall score based on everything from military victories to total population - are removed from the map, with their cities becoming explorable ruins. It's possible to turn this off for human players, which is nice. But I didn't really get the sense that streamlining the later eras to just a handful of great powers was worth losing the diplomatic complexity of a larger cast. In a 12-player game, eight will move on to Act 2 and five will remain competing for the top spot in Act 3. It's also just weird the second time it happens, with bustling Enlightenment-era cities vanishing overnight. Diplomacy is as basic as it could possibly be in this type of game, with the ability to send gifts, declare wars, open borders, and broker alliances and research agreements. Trade can be useful in the early game when you don't have access to a resource you really need for a higher-tier building, but you need to heavily commit to it to have enough merchant capacity later on to even make a dent in your goods deficit. Government, religion, and advisers are also pretty unmemorable. Like leader choice, it's just stacking more numerical modifiers. They don't typically unlock new playstyles or new ways to solve problems. They just make you marginally better at doing things you could already do anyway.