It’s always a hard task to compete against series giants like Sid Meier’s Civilization and Crusader Kings, but Ara: History Untold has some real industry veterans leading its charge, with many of its developers having worked on games like Civilization 5 and Age of Empires.
At first glance, Ara: History Untold doesn’t look all that different from Civilization, and the similarities are not just skin-deep. After all, what new mechanic can you bring to the genre that hasn’t been tried and ditched, or already mastered by the greats? But if Alexander the Great had looked at the pyramids of Egypt and said “Eh, never mind, I can’t do anything better than that”, then we never would have gotten the Library of Alexandra.
The way Ara looks, the map, the UI, the extensive encyclopaedia, and the array of other mechanics like turn-based combat, technology trees, and resource management. It’s important to note though that all of these are expected of the genre, and rather than feeling derivative, these similarities help prevent information overload as you try to get a handle on what the game does differently. Ara has quite a lot to juggle already, so learning a brand-new UI layout might have threatened to tip me over the edge.
To win a game of Ara, you need the same things as its rivals: prestige, earned through the usual spread of military, religious, cultural, and diplomatic achievements. But Ara sets itself apart by separating its game into 3 Acts consisting of 4 general eras of technology. For example, Act 1 consists of the ancient era through to the end of the antiquities era, about the 6th Century CE. Upon reaching the end of an Act, the civilisations with the fewest Prestige points are culled and don’t get to continue the game. As a non-competitive gamer, I appreciate the hell out of this. I prefer to know when my goose is cooked; I don’t want to wait around for 300 turns to find out that I never had a chance in hell of winning. For those who prefer the chance of an epic comeback, though, there is an in-game option that will ensure that human players are never culled this way.
“The world feels incredibly vast…”
The world feels incredibly vast, more so than the recent 4X games I’ve played recently, including Civ 6 and Humankind. I think this is the result of how itty-bitty they have made the ant-humans milling around your cities in comparison to the map size. This is an important feature of Ara’s design because the improvements you build within your territory are all individually visible from the map. Rather than being neatly assigned on a hexagon, territories come in all kinds of odd shapes and sizes, and are separated into zones. Each zone can hold only one improvement, so planning which territories you’re going to claim has more to consider than just what resources you can find there. Deciding what you’re going to build in the zones is even more critical, as poor city planning can cause you real problems later on.
The number of different resources available is frankly overwhelming, but in a way that makes me excited to play more games in the future. It was clear that in my first game, I was only scratching the surface of what resources I could gather and what I could make from them, and it’s really hard to keep track of all of the different production bonuses. Ara expands the concept of resources into a multifaceted economy that is more complex and involved than I’ve seen in a 4X game ever.
Resources are consumed by your industry buildings — workshops, pottery studios, and bakeries to name just a few — to craft products that can either be used as luxuries for passive city buffs, consumed by other industries to speed up production, or used in the construction of Triumphs. I love this, because it really feels like your civilisation is made up of millions of individuals pursuing their own crafts, and less like a hivemind obeying the orders of a queen bee. However, I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking it’s too much to manage. It’s not always easy to find out exactly where you’re using all these resources, meaning you need to click each improvement individually to check if perhaps it might be consuming a resource you want to stockpile.
Something you don’t need to micromanage to death is diplomacy, at least not in Act 1. Certain events that require your decision can have either a positive or negative effect, but just as often your neighbours will make up their own minds about you, and there’s very little you can do about it. Trading between nations is also a simple affair; arguably too simple. If other nations like you enough to agree to a trade deal, you can nab a copy of their resources for yourself, and vice-versa, no roads or ports needed. It’s so simple that it seems like an afterthought when compared with how complex your local economy is to manage.
My other small nitpick is with managing your military, which could use some more depth. Ara uses an interesting concept of having to “muster” your forces after creating them: until then, your units are just in your reserve and not costing you gold. This is a fine idea, but once you muster them into one of a few available formations, there doesn’t seem to be a way you can change their formation, add more units, or even send them back to your reserve like you could with a real army. If there is a way to do this, then the game sure didn’t waste any time explaining it, but since the tutorial is otherwise quite good, it’s more likely that these options just don’t exist.
Sadly, I only got up the the early-middle ages before my game developed an unexpected fault that made it impossible to continue. I’m actually devastated, because I was having a great time and was just getting the hang of planning out my territories and managing my resources. An internet search for anyone else experiencing my issue didn’t turn up anything, so I blame my hardware and not Ara, though it’s worth noting that I did share some performance issues, like lagging between turns, that were not rectified by turning down the graphical settings.
If and when my PC decides to behave itself, I will be very interested to know how diplomacy and trade in particular will develop in Acts 2 and 3; which is to say that I hope they do, in fact, develop. Critically, I couldn’t access the late stages of the game, that phase of every 4X game where the whole map has been explored, all viable territory has been claimed, and it’s just the final stretch to the finish line. I wonder is Ara lasts the test of time?
About the Author
Edie W-K
she/her
If it isn't video games, Edie doesn't care about it. She's been playing games since the N64 era, and only spent enough time away from her 3DS to earn a Bachelor in Games Design from RMIT.
