Ara: History Untold, was first revealed waaay back in Xbox’s summer showcase of 2022 and it was to be a competitor in the PC-centric turn-based historical strategy 4X genre. Well, Civilization. It’s now been more than two years and the game is finally ready to release on PC (with an Xbox version planned for sometime in the future.) After many insider tests and updates, is Ara: History Untold, a game worth playing? Well, that depends, but keep reading the XboxEra review to see what we think.
Now before I dive into my review itself, I do have a bit of a disclaimer I need to get through. While I’m a pretty big fan of the RTS genre, I’ve only occasionally played Civilization or games like it. Meaning, that this review isn’t coming from someone with hundreds of hours already played in this game’s direct competitor and clear inspiration. If you’re looking for someone who can contrast and compare everything in Ara to Civ, then you’re at the wrong place. On the other hand, if you’re looking for the opinion of someone who’s still very much interested in the genre but isn’t already a diehard fan, then keep reading on!
Ara Ara?
Ara: History Untold was created by Oxide Games, itself made up of many developers that worked on Civilization V in the past and published by Xbox Games Studios Publishing. With Ara, Oxide wanted to make a game that innovated in the 4X genre, while competing directly with the biggest players. As someone who’s been playing the game for the past week and a half or so, I don’t think they succeeded with everything they set out to do, but they certainly made a worthwhile competitor in an oft-stagnant space.
When you start the game, you choose between single or multiplayer (more on this one later), and then you select your “Leader” for the duration of the playthrough. Now here’s where Ara already differentiates itself from previous Civilization games just a little. With 41 unique characters to choose from, Ara provides a breadth of choice between civilizations, historical time periods, what leaders were known for, and more. Oxide clearly didn’t stick only with the “big names” of history, but made effort to include figures that may not have been as outwardly famous as some others, but still made a major impact to this world in one form or another. From George Washington, to Elizabeth I, to Tokugawa Ieyasu, to Wilma Mankiller, and so on, there’s quite a bit to choose from, each with their own various perks and recommended playstyles.
Don’t Fall Off!
Now let’s dive into the game itself. While I could go over every game feature and mechanic Ara has, doing so would probably take me half an hour or more. Instead, I’m going to be taking a mostly overview approach while diving into some of the more interesting parts.
So right away, Ara: History Untold is very, very similar to Civilization. It’s a turn-based game set on a grid system where you start off in the ancient age and eventually make your way to modern day, and maybe a little more. The objective of the game is to survive until the very end with the highest “Prestige”, a currency earned by completing various tasks: from simply growing cities, creating “Triumphs”, winning wars, and pretty much anything you can do that keeps your people happy and thriving. Now I say “survive”, because in Ara the game is divided into three “Acts”. And each act is divided into four “Technological Eras”.
While you play the game, you constantly have a tech research in progress. Once you finish enough of them, you can then research the next era, though that prevents you from selecting any leftover research from the era you’re currently on. Back to the “survival” part, when enough players (it varies depending on the total number) have progressed through the four tech eras, the game moves on to the next Act. During this transition, the two players with the lowest amount of Prestige are removed from the game. This… sounds a little complicated, but when you’re playing the game it’s a pretty quick thing to grasp. The gist of it is, keep your Prestige up, plan ahead, and keep an eye on the other nations, allied or no.
The most surefire way I found of gaining Prestige was in creating Triumphs, essentially big historical landmarks like Stonehenge or The Hanging Gardens, which always provide a large amount of Prestige at completion. The catch? You may not have the required materials or research needed, and only one Triumph of each type can be made per game. Meaning if another nation beats you to it, you’re out of luck. The game helps facilitate your progress by providing player shared “Goals” throughout, such as creating a certain Triumph or getting your total population to a certain number. These goals always give a good amount of Prestige to the first player (sometimes the second and third as well) to complete them.
Speaking of growth, your cities continuously get bigger over time as long as the people’s necessities are met (such as food, housing space, etc). Once they get bigger, you’re able to “claim” another zone around your city centre. These zones are made up of a certain amount of regions, which is where you create “improvements”. These are essentially buildings that provide you with resources (wealth, food, wood, and material), or are buildings that utilize your resources to craft items. What do you do with crafted items you ask? There’s a lot to it, but they’re essentially consumable resources that you can use to create certain buildings and triumphs, place them in Improvements to speed things up, or utilize them directly in city centres to help keep your people happy.
This Means War
Now it wouldn’t be a historic strategy game without combat, and Ara puts an interesting spin on it. You can create a variety of combat units at your cities (rather than creating an improvement), and once complete they enter your reserves. You then can choose to deploy these units at whichever city you please, regardless of where the unit was created. This deployment process also has you decide how you group your units, from just the unit itself to various formations that can offer combat buffs. For example, you can create a “legion” with four combat units, and you can further choose from selected tactics such as a “Shield Wall”, which requires three melee units and one ranged unit to create. This adds another level of strategy to the game as certain types of units and formations are more effective at specific tasks, such as besieging a city or combating cavalry.
As to when you fight, it depends on how diplomatic you are towards others (and how diplomatic they are towards you). In Ara, you can declare war against other nations at the cost of Prestige, but the game penalizes or rewards you for this depending on your reasoning for the conflict. For example, an enemy nation declared war on me because I upset them by not agreeing to their asks. After the war concluded (due to their failure to take my targeted city,) I had the option to declare a “retaliatory war” after the specified peace period ended. When I did so, my Prestige cost was low and I chose an enemy city as my target. After winning the war, I could either take the city into my nation or raze it to the ground.
Digging Deeper
The last thing I’ll dive into are the “events” that happen throughout the game. Ara isn’t exactly a fast game, especially at the start, where more often than not you’re simply pressing “next turn” after doing just a few actions. And so the “events” mechanic was a welcome one, as it helps provide variety and stimulation while playing. Every so often you’ll be presented with a problem and a choice on how to solve it. This can range from a neighboring tribe being angry at your presence, a different nation wanting to offer you advice on irrigation, your own citizens asking you for a scholarship, and so on. In each case, you have to weigh the pros and cons of what to pick, such as obtaining more wealth at the cost of damaging your relationship with another. As mentioned this system helps breath life into the game, especially in the early stages, so it’s a very welcome addition.
There’s even more to the game of course, such as Paragons (historical figures that you can assign as different kinds of advisors to your nation), founding Religions, changing governments, creating “masterpieces” and so on. Suffice it to say, Ara: History Untold has a good amount of depth and potential, where in every game you’ll always find something else to improve on or master. Oxide promises that “no two games are the same” and they’re certainly not wrong. From the leader choice, to the event system, to the decisions you make, the games I played did feel different. But this wasn’t always a good thing.
No 15 Minute Turns
Let’s talk a little about the multiplayer and probably the most intriguing change in Ara compared to similar titles. Ara: History Untold uses a simultaneous turn system. Meaning, rather than having to constantly wait for other players to complete their actions, everyone does their turn at the same time. You choose what you want to do, from moving units to creating buildings to claiming new regions, and more, and then you simply end your turn. While the playerbase during the review period was, of course, small, making multiplayer difficult to test, I was able to play a game with a friend to get an idea of how it worked.
In multiplayer, you can choose how long players have to complete their turns, which can help keep things moving, but I found that even the default times given were a little too slow. In the game I was playing with my friend, the first 120 turns passed by without much happening. I simply expanded my nation, met a few tribes, sent my scout to explore and pick up caches of resources, etc, but I had no battles or conflicts. Heck, I didn’t even meet another nation until turn 50 or so. This was in stark contrast to the solo games I played, which felt much faster-paced and full of “action”. This could have been in part due to the difficulty I selected this time around.
Slow and Steady?
Oxide recommends new players select the “Viscount” difficulty, which is one lower than “normal”. In this difficulty, I had no problem staying at the top of the Prestige rankings and winning whatever battles came my way. For the multiplayer game though, I selected the “normal” difficulty and oh boy was it a big jump. Watching the computer-controlled nations rise up on Prestige steadily while I stagnated showed me that I had a whole lot still to learn about the game. More then that though, the game became a desperate struggle to stay out of the bottom two on the list and survive into the next Act. Fortunately, I was able to just barely do so through the creations of a few Triumphs. My friend on the other hand, wasn’t so lucky and was removed from the game at the start of Act 2. Speaking of, something cool Ara does is that lost civilizations leave “ruins” at their previous locations. These ruins can be opened by scouts to obtain resources, though they’re often protected by bands of roaming enemies.
Now while this game feeling slower could have been attributed to the difficulty I selected, playing with other people also does add an element of “lag” to the game. Where you need to wait for everyone to finish their turn, then wait for the turn to be processed in the server, before finally starting the next one. Compared to single player it feels a fair bit slower, but I imagine when compared to multiplayer in a game like Civ where each turn is done separately, it’s still much, much faster overall.
The last thing I’ll mention about multiplayer is that Oxide certainly tried to make the process as painless as possible. You can start a multiplayer game with only one or two other real people (or even just all AIs), but others can see your game as it’s being played on the “Join Game” list. From there they can join in your game by taking the place of an AI controlled player, even if the game is 100s of turns in. Even more then that, you can go “afk” if needed and an AI will continue your actions, letting the game progress until you return. All in all, multiplayer seems well thought out and full of quality of life features. However I wasn’t able to test this in depth during my review time, as there simply weren’t enough multiplayer games available to join (and no one ended up joining mine.)
Oh Wow, You Can Really Zoom In
While Ara: History Untold certainly doesn’t look bad, it also didn’t blow me away in the visuals at all. The game shares the cartoony style for the leaders from some other games in the genre, which works well, and the map can be zoomed in quite a bit to really get an idea of what your buildings, citizens, or soldiers in battle are doing.
The game prioritizes function and readability over other things which I appreciated, especially with the optional overlays, such as seeing the resources of each zone. But at the same time it’s hard not to think the game is “smaller” than other titles, with limited dialogue from other nations and only a 2D marker to denote your units as they travel around the map. Overall the visuals do their job in providing instant readability while still maintaining a specific identity throughout. Sadly, these so-so visuals seem to have come at a large cost.
While I didn’t come across any obvious bugs or the like, the performance of the game itself was hit or miss. When I was initially playing on a non-gaming laptop, I was getting pretty low framerate throughout. This wasn’t a surprise to me of course, and the game was still perfectly playable (heck hours passed without me even realizing), but when I switched over to my beefier mid-range PC, I was expecting significantly better frames. And yes, I got them, but not without slowdown at what seemed like the start of every single turn. I’m not sure if this is a bug or if the game needs more optimization, but with my 3070 and 5800x, I should be getting a consistent frame rate throughout, especially at “medium” settings.
Not Without Flaws
Ara: History Untold is a game full of depth and mechanics to master. My limited time with it during this review period wasn’t enough to fully experience everything the game has to offer, but it was enough to know that this isn’t just a simple copy of others in the genre. Oxide Games wanted to make something unique that could stand on its own two feet, and I think for the most part they succeeded. From the variety in the leaders, to the decisions you make during events, to the path you choose in creating the best nation for your people, there’s always something to get better at and learn. Add in the tooltip system that lets you quickly learn what everything does by putting your cursor over it and a decent enough tutorial, the game is also pretty friendly to newcomers of the genre. Yet parts of it still feel almost unfinished, or at the very least unpolished.
For example, interactions with other nations felt lacking a little. While sure they differed visually, I didn’t feel that any of them had a “personality”, so to speak. Heck there were times where I had no idea why I was denounced by another nation and my relationship changed from friends to adversaries. I’m sure it was due to something I did, maybe a type of government I picked, or my religion choice, but the game didn’t make it clear. This issue alongside the whiplash I had going from a game where everything was moving really slow, to a game where I was bombarded with things to manage every single turn, makes me think there’s still some work to be done here.
A Worthy Competitor
There’s a lot to like about Ara: History Untold, even with the rough edges that appear every so often. Barring some performance issues, I’d say anyone even a little curious about the genre should give the game a shot and try it for themselves (especially if you have Xbox Game Pass). As for those of you with hundreds of hours in 4X games? Well, Civilization VII is still months away and Ara is a worthwhile competitor in the space and so I highly recommend playing at least a few games during this wait. Who knows, maybe you’ll find yourself with a new favourite in the genre…
Ara: History Untold
Played on
Windows PC
PROS
- Simultaneous Turns
- Good Variety of Leaders
- Unique Gameplay Mechanics
- Large Amounts of Depth
CONS
- Competing Nations Have Little Personality
- FPS Drops At Start of Turns
- Sometimes Too Slow, Sometimes Too Fast
- Feels Unpolished At Times
