Ara: History Untold Review

There’s a real hustle and bustle to the historical 4X strategy genre right now, and Oxide Games’ Ara: History Untold is another strong contender for the crown that brings more fresh ideas and perspectives to a very familiar setting.

Ara: History Untold tries to put a distinctive spin on how historical events and the rise and fall of various civilisations are depicted in this genre, and one thing I particularly like is how this affects the victory conditions. Everything that you do is in the name of accruing Prestige, and points are handed out for everything, from completing technological research to winning wars, holding onto alliances, simply producing a lot of goods, or pushing for cultural advancement and looking after your people through your governance.

You’ll still progress through historical technological eras in turn, but there’s also an overarching three-act structure as soon as multiple nations reach certain eras – and if you want, you can skip certain research groups in order to skip ahead an era. Each act transition also brings with it a winnowing of the field of competitors, the lower nations being consigned to the history books, their cities turning into ruins in the process.

It helps add some stakes earlier in the game, giving you a hurry up if you see that you’re falling behind after the first hundred turns, and potentially pushing you to min-max down a particular path to earn Prestige. Find yourself lagging behind in the Iron Age, and you might start throwing some armies around in the Antiquities, picking on some other lower-placed nations to scrabble your way back up.

One of the biggest and best ways to get ahead, though, is simply to look after your people and their quality of life. Each city has an individual measure of its citizens’ contentment across five categories, ensuring that you have to keep your city fairly well balanced in terms of what it provides. You’ll have to keep pace with providing a well for your people to give them fresh water, build inns and trading posts to help commerce come through your city and enrich them, add commodities to dwellings so there’s a degree of comfort, and provide certain structures like watchtowers and city walls to give a feeling of security. With all of these at least decently catered to, and keeping up with technological building upgrades, your city will grow naturally, your Prestige points growing alongside.

Ara: History Untold ditches the hexagonal tiles so common to the 4X genre in favour of more organic-looking regions, in the fashion of Total War’s campaign map. In addition to simply giving a baseline batch of resources each turn, each region is subdivided into multiple smaller plots where you can place your Improvements (buildings), each one giving the visual appearance of a city’s sprawl spreading across it, with higgledy-piggledy roads, buildings, and people meandering around, all visible as you select Improvements and the camera zooms in. As you butt up against rival nation borders, it will eventually lead to the world starting to look like a Neo Tokyo-like mega-city with every plot available occupied, but this general art direction and the way it’s presented is really lovely.

You have a similar effect when presented with a narrative decision moment, whether it’s interacting with a small tribe or a diplomatic message, the camera again pulling right into the world. More dramatic are battles, which let you view replays that feel ripped out of TABS as your units just mash into each other.

There’s a great deal of emphasis put on the resource gathering and production lines through your nation, and it just about tip toes along the thin line between complex depth and ease of use. Beyond basic food, materials, wood and gold, you have all manner of items that you will want and need to craft with production buildings. A farm will produce the grain that can head to a granary to craft grain store, or eventually to a mill that can create the flour needed for a bakery, which can produce baked goods that have a greater impact than raw food.

Workshops and their later evolutions are the real backbone to your production pipelines, able to craft all manner of fundamental tools and utility items – metal tools, wheels, rope and more – which are sometimes required for construction or which can be added to buildings to boost their overall output. A lot of goods are also able to pull double duty that can give a city-wide impact for a period of time, whether it’s feasts that boost happiness and growth, books that boost city knowledge, or wine to help them loosen up a bit.

Through all of this, there’s understandably quite a bit of micro-management, though there’s a good few views that put all of your buildings and production into perspective. It takes a while to figure out where everything is and what views work best for you, but you get the hang of things before the second age. Again, it does teeter on being overwhelming, but over time I feel it comes down on the right side of the scale.

I’m not sure that diplomacy is one of Ara: History Untold’s strongest suits. It’s perhaps a little too easy to just get along well with pretty much everyone, quickly fulfilling their requests, no matter how trivial they might sound, and getting a commensurate bump in perceptions. With no real effort of my own on standard difficulty, I was being bombarded with requests for trade, to share research and get a boost to research output, and eventually to form alliances.

Those alliances don’t seem to really be affected by wars, as you can happily ally while in the middle of a regional scuffle, and there’s no real ding to your reputation for being a bit of a scrapper (except for the nations you actually fight with, of course). Of course, being allied can see you dragged into a war, and that led to some really confounding results, admittedly somewhat obscured by sight range. One of the most baffling instances saw an AI-started war where an overwhelmingly strong alliance capitulated to a single, very surrounded nation, and cede both capital cities of my allies. It was difficult to really pin down what happened.

Battles feel similarly abrupt. They will generally unfold over multiple turns, giving you a chance to reinforce with a second army or send long-ranged fire from ships and artillery, but there’s little ceremony to them, outside of the optional battle replays. It would be nice to have an optional battle report pop up at the start of a turn to give you a run down, and foreground it beyond the resource management and jobs list. It would also be nice to be able to redeploy your armies in different configurations as you unlock new formations, and to be able to upgrade units to newer technology.

However, it’s fair to say that war is more of a necessary evil than a go-to tactic – even being able to declare war for anything more than mischief requires shared borders, retaliation, or certain government types. Much more emphasis is put on furthering your culture, crafting the goods you need, spreading your city borders, and constructing landmark wonders.