The founding team at Oxide Games is heavily composed of leadership that worked on Civilization 5, so it should come as little surprise that the crew pursued a new take on 4X as one of its latest projects. Ara: History Untold is a vast, new 4X game featuring a large variety of nations with different playstyles, a rich system of crafting to keep your production up and your cities moving forward, and highly customizable maps full of various strategic opportunities. It doesn’t do a lot to break away from a few common pitfalls in 4X, but it is a grandiose new flavor from the team behind Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation and should keep fans busy for hundreds of turns as they build their nation to withstand the test of time.
Numerous budding nations
Ara: History Untold is a 4X game that sticks to having real world-inspired nations play through the ages of history. Right out of the gate, one of the highlights of this game is the sheer number of nations and leaders to choose from, each with something a little different about each one. For instance, Germany’s Otto von Bismark is far more military-specialized for building combat units and engaging in conquest than the same nation’s Hildegard von Bingen, who focuses far more on religious expansion and knowledge bonuses for making her religion the dominant one. There are a great deal of other nations built towards various styles of play, making many of them fun to explore.
I will say that with so many nations, it’s not like all of them play equal, and some do similar things with one quality being just a bit (or a lot) better. For instance, Harun al-Rashid of the Abbasid Caliphate gets good research and knowledge bonuses for academies and research agreements, but once again, Hildegard gets research bonuses from monastaries, plus happiness and health in cities where her religion is dominant. It’s a bit of a different flavor, but there are several nations and leaders like that. It’s nice to have so much to choose from. I just wish they were a bit more distinct in their strengths.
That said, once you get into the world of Ara: History Untold, it’s pretty clear Oxide Studios has put its history of experience in this type of game to work. Players start out on a randomized plot of land on a randomized map which can be adjusted to a variety of styles, including one-continent “Pangaea” setups, arid and tundra worlds, tropical islands, and setups more similar to our actual current world arrangement of land and water. As one might expect, your early priority is to build infrastructure in your capital city, grow its population, expand its borders, and then found new cities where you do the same. The basic drivers of a Civilization-style 4X game are all here, including timber and materials for building, food and housing for city population growth, and knowledge for discovering new technologies. I’d say if you’ve played a Civ game at any point, you’ll have a basic idea of what to expect and how to navigate it.
The worlds are also very pretty in Ara: History Untold. As you navigate it, you’ll discover a wide variety of biomes, as well as other nations who have staked their claims in various areas. One of the best parts of the game is the simultaneous turn system in which all players take their turn at the same time. Once you set your build queue, manage your projects, and move your units, you have to wait for the next turn, but with everybody doing their things at once, it moves along so much faster than late game versions of Civ where it could drag for a long time. I love that streamlining, and I enjoy that the game looks so nice while not drowning itself in wait times as numerous nations act between turns. There are even choices that pop up between turns with villages and other nations that can affect bonuses or debuffs for your nation, as well as your relationship standing with them, which adds a fun narrative element.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t alleviate all of the grind of 4X. The mid to late game of Ara drags. The end goal of the game is ultimately to gain prestige by advancing your history, building monuments, gaining technology before others, and establishing your empire through trade or conquest. However, when I started to get to the mid-game, I found myself sitting on long periods of time without anything to build because I was focusing my attention on some specific goals that took a lot of resources. This means periods of waiting turn after turn for the next big moment to happen. It’s tedious in most 4X games at a certain point and Ara: History Untold doesn’t really escape that issue outside of making game progress run faster.
Your path through history as you like it
As mentioned above, despite the mid to late game tedium, Ara: History Untold has a lot of ways for you to play and keep your empire growing, and a big part of that is in this game’s unique crafting system. There are tons of buildings and district structures that produce resources outside of the core elements such as timber, materials, gold, food, and science. If you assemble a workshop, you can use it to build wheels. Those wheels can be used in a stable to make plows, which can then be equipped to any farm to boost its food output.
You also end up using similar resources in a variety of things. For instance, if your land has a pig resource, you can build a farm to harvest the pigs for a butcher shop to make cured meats that add to your city’s food supply, or you can harvest them for tallow to make candles that boost your city’s knowledge and science. There are numerous ways to optimize your production depending on your goals and priorities and I love that in Ara. It kept buildings I put up quite a while back engaging as I constantly switched production priorities and crafting queues. You can even set certain buildings on a permanent craft to keep making a certain thing forever or set limited craft queues to get what you need before they switch back to a usual routine.
What I don’t like is that Ara: History Untold isn’t too organized in telling you what resources you have for any given building at any given time. There are times where you’ll get an improved version of a component that will boost productivity in a building, such as getting lithic tools for the workshop, and then later developing metal tools that do exactly what lithic tools do, but better. My issue is Ara doesn’t tell you if you have better components for a building. You just have to check every building constantly and see if you have the best gear equipped to it. It’s not so bad when you have one city, but when you have three or four, and they all have like 20 buildings, the process gets tedious. Even just being told I have a building with an open equipment slot and available equipment to fill it would have been nice. Thankfully, Ara has queue notifications for a variety of other matters. It will tell you if a city’s building queue or a building’s production queue is idle and prompt you to get it going again.
Finally, I think there are a few progress methodologies in this game that are weaker than others. Ultimately, your goal is to have high prestige, but if you don’t have enough by the time a nation breaks through to a new age of history, the nations with the lowest Prestige scores will get knocked out of the game. That’s not too much of an issue for peaceful religious, scientific, or cultural nations, but becoming enemies with a nation and waging war costs Prestige points. As in, you actually lose some of the score you need to stay in the game to be militaristic. You can win it back by winning the war, but it's a gamble on if your forces are good enough to finish the fight and whether or not other nations get involved to ruin your plans. Strategically and politically, it makes sense that there would be risk, but it seems a littel unfair in regards to prestige points where other nations don’t have to sacrifice the main point resource to play their style. In fact, I found conquest and military-focused nations just a bit harder when it came to staying afloat in a campaign compared to the peaceful ones.
Let your tapestry of time and culture unfold
Despite a few issues, I still think Ara: History Untold is some of the most fun I’ve had with a 4X historical nations game that wasn’t Civilization. Oxide Studios clearly knew the assignment and they aced on a number of fronts. It’s a little disappointing that for their experience, they weren’t able to avoid common issues like mid-to-late grind, but if you want a game that will offer plenty of variety in playstyles and an interesting and engaging crafting mechanic, Ara: History Untold is quite an extensive option for any fan of 4X strategy.
This review is based on an early copy provided by the publisher. Ara: History Untold comes out on PC on September 24, 2024.
Ara: History Untold
- A wide variety of nations and leaders to choose from
- Campaign maps are gorgeous and fun to unravel
- Crafting provides numerous ways to optimize your nation
- Wide variety of playstyles to explore
- Simultaneous player turns keep the game progressing nicely
- Mid to late game drags
- Military nations seem to be at a disadvantage
- Managing every building's equipment and production can be tedious
- Some nations' benefits feel redundant or weak compared to others
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replyTJ Denzer posted a new article, Ara: History Untold review: You have entered a Golden Age
