Ara: History Untold Review

Competition is always good – whether fighting online to get that top score, or when a business that becomes complacent is soon challenged by a fresh and better alternative. But as much as some may try, certain monopolies still manage to take hold sometimes, and establish a level of dominance. That's been the case with the turn based 4X strategy genre, specifically with the historical setting. The 1991 launch of Sid Meier's Civilization brought a new kind of game to market, and it's been setting the standard ever since, with few vying to take its crown. But in recent years, some competition did emerge, such as Humankind, and other games with slightly different themes like Endless Legend and Stellaris. The newest entrant into the genre is Ara: History Untold, a sophomore effort from Oxide Games. While the name is somewhat too generic, it does a serviceable job of emulating and switching things up, though its most notable departures from the Civ formula are also a bit of its undoing.

Ara lets players dive into a turn-based simulation of the world, from the ancient times and into the modern era, and try to guide a selected nation and its people to success. The game offers a choice from a wide selection of historical figures, and their nations, such as Nefertiti of Egypt, Howard Florey of Australia, Tamar The Great of Georgia, Joan of Arc of France, and more. The roster is fairly impressive in size, with over 30 characters to play as, putting the game on the front foot. Each leader has the expected variety of special perks or bonuses, as well as the occasional downside. These bonuses affect how your future empire will thrive, by providing bonus food output, increasing production, or boosting the strength of your armies outside of your territory. Selecting a leader remains an integral part of a winning strategy, and affects how you play. Each leader comes with their own colors, symbol, and of course a 3D animated rendering. There are also multiple color choices for the clothing of the leader, which adds a tiny but welcome bit of visual variety.

Next in the usual process of starting a game is choosing a map and some settings. Here, Ara is a bit less flexible than its contemporaries. There is the usual assortment of difficulty levels, with normal and easy being on the bottom half of the list. You can then select either a randomly generated map with a few parameters, or use a pre-made layout. While you can see a quick photo of the pre-made maps, the randomly generated ones sadly do not provide an example photo or description for their style options. You can also set the length of the game, from short at 300 turns to long at 1200 turn limit.

The ultimate victor is declared as the nation that has the most Prestige points at the end of the turn limit. Prestige points are earned by completing tasks or expanding your empire in a variety of familiar categories – military (declare and win wars), commerce (accumulate wealth, trade), culture, religion, and others. Contributing points to these categories comes from usual gameplay mechanics, such as constructing relevant buildings, special historical structures, or performing certain actions. It's a little disappointing that the game doesn’t offer more victory conditions as options for custom games.

Progress through history is mapped across three Acts, which roughly correlate to the ancient, Renaissance/medieval, and modern/future eras. The game advances to another Act after a certain number of nations have reached the progress threshold, and flashes a warning that it will begin in a few turns. The nations that are not in the top half of the Prestige points standings are culled, which is an interesting way to introduce intensity at all stages of a game. The nations that are gone get simply wiped off the map, leaving a scattering of resources for the remaining players to pick off. It avoids the Civ problem of end-game clusters of huge nations that are just bordering each other with nowhere to grow. There is an option to turn off the culling of human players during the pre-game setup, if you so choose.

With the map options and other conditions set, your new historical adventure begins. Players start with a city and a scout unit, skipping the initial phase from other games of finding the ideal starting location. As you send the scout to auto-explore, collecting resources and introducing you to tribes and rival nations, you can turn your attention to the city. Cities have ratings in production, prosperity, and knowledge – all the usual metrics that contribute towards your nation's growth and progress. Improving these ratings by constructing relevant buildings increases their output, either with faster construction, money, or accelerated research. So far, so standard.

But differences begin to appear fairly quickly. The map Ara uses a sort of free-flowing Voronoi diagrams shapes for the land, so there's a bit of free form style going on. As the city grows, players can select the next area around the city to claim, called a zone. Each zone contains a certain level of food and materials that will be produced, as indicated by icons, as well as slots for new building construction. The zones can hold between 2 to 5 slots, letting you build more farms, barracks, libraries, manufacturing facilities, and whatever else is needed. Buildings have the usual upkeep and production stats, which can be further improved by placing groups of relevant buildings together into the same zone.

All of these buildings can produce things, and not just the overall inventory resources that are used as needed. Ara differentiates itself by having a rather detailed resource management system. For each production building, you can often choose more than one output – so a workshop can produce lots of different items, from farming equipment to wheels and candles. The speed of production can be improved by applying finite supplies to the building slot, as well as applying natural resources to the item being crafted. There are often multiple slots that can have resource items in them to boost a building's output, but only specific items can be equipped, such as silk for making clothes, or plows for the farms.

While natural resources can be found, most of the items you need must be manufactured, so you begin to scour the information panel of the buildings to see what they output. As you get familiar, you begin to construct and apply items to resource slots efficiently, trying to maximize the production as soon as possible. The city menu can still take some getting used to, but there are efficiencies – such as being able to construct something by directly selecting the zone and slot, and not manually choosing a spot on the 3D map. Icons helpfully recommend what to build on special natural resource nodes – but it would have been helpful to get more guidance for the rest of your zones within a city. The game does feature a tutorial, but it isn't overly user-friendly, and did get stuck a number of times, not progressing to the next lesson despite completing the tasks it requested.

As your scout explores nearby areas and your first city grows, you'll want to get another city going relatively quickly, and so after building settlers and sending them off to another strategic location, the second city pops up and the growth begins anew. To help your current and future cities grow faster, they too can be equipped with amenities – finite, rarer items that are often the end result of a slightly longer production chain. Equipping these grants your city notably large bonuses, often in multiple categories, from citizen happiness to improved cash flow. Another way to increase production is to assign "experts" to almost any building; they can be moved around at any time as you need to ramp up manufacturing elsewhere within the city. It's a somewhat under baked mechanic, as you have faceless portraits that just give you another micromanagement item to worry about.

While things start off manageable, as your cities begin to grow and new ones are founded, dealing with the construction process and resources becomes painful. There is already enough micromanagement to worry about in a typical Civ-style game, but layering this tinkering with production chains and manually assigning items into slots creates an annoyance that only becomes worse as you reach mid and late stages of history. You unlock new resources rapidly in the later stages, and now have to go through your multitudes of buildings and change their production materials and what they are creating. Things get really bogged down with so much tinkering, which needs to happen relatively often as the needs of your nation change and evolve.

Even if you are the kind of player who enjoys this level of manual intervention, you will find that the game's UI is not well implemented. When constructing new buildings, there is a search bar, but it relies on you memorizing the structure names, and an award filter that resets each time you click away. The city view offers options to group your existing buildings into categories such as harvesters and crafters. So while you can scroll through and click the slots of each building to equip a production boosting item, the menu still keeps them separated by zones, instead of putting all workshops together for example to make it easier and quicker. Those slots are also haphazardly implemented, showing you all possible items that can be equipped – so you can see an empty slot on a Housing building where refrigerators can go, even if you are still in ancient times. Even more annoying is that when you upgrade buildings as they become more advanced in the later eras, the slot upgrades get unequipped, forcing you to go through the painstaking process again. If there are any positives, it's that the game provides fairly clear and easy to understand pop-ups when hovering over resources and materials, and tells you which buildings can produce/consume them.

There are also some balancing issues. Across all our hours of play and multiple nations tested, food seemed to be a constant problem, even if you spam farms together in zones for maximum bonuses. Our cities would end up largely as farm-fields, which barely kept up with demand and left little room for other structures. You can construct special historical buildings (Wonders) for extra bonuses, and as usual only one can exist in the world. However these take up an entire zone, so their benefit is sometimes questionable.

Difficulty of AI opponents also may need adjusting. While we won a couple of games, as the AI drops off in the third Act, we lost many more because there was not enough Prestige earned by the time Act 1 concluded and the bottom nations were culled. We tried many different leaders, strategies, and difficulty settings (normal and up), but in general the AI seems to be farming Prestige points with extreme speed, leaving you behind very rapidly, and it's difficult to recover. They aren’t constructing Wonders or winning wars, expanding rapidly or dominating religion and science, and yet their point totals are always very high. Players are forced to expand and focus on point gathering across the board, rather than structuring their empire for a specific goal and how they want to play – in Civ terms, trying to go for a specific victory condition such as science, religion, culture, or military might. There are Act Goals that basically ask you to construct a Wonder, or be among the first to construct a specific building, for extra Prestige points, but even chasing these isn't enough sometimes.

In between all the internal city management and resource reassignments, you'll have to take time to address other aspects of the nation. The science tech unlocks works in familiar ways, as you generate knowledge from your cities which speeds up research. Players have to unlock a certain number of technologies before moving on to the next section, and it's possible to skip some tech and just move ahead. You can found a religion as well, construct some relevant buildings to strengthen its spread, and create units that will maintain its dominance and spread it around the map. Religion allows for new passive perks to be unlocked as it grows – as does selecting a new government type, which is a choice that pops up throughout the game. Here players get some more passive bonuses, as well as a choice of taxation level, which can increase happiness if kept low. As your empire grows, you also get Paragons (advisors) that can provide passive bonuses and perks if equipped to manage your nation as a whole; they can also be sent to be a leader of specific army units, or slotted into art buildings to create masterpieces and collections for more Prestige points.

You're not alone in this world, so dealing with other nations and independent villages will be commonplace. The small standalone villages often produce narrative events, where you have to make choices to help them with something or make relationship decisions, with outcomes often carrying a variety of consequences. These events are initially interesting but have quite a low variety, as you start seeing the same things over and over in future games. There are no barbarians, but some land has predators that need clearing with military unit. The other major political component is of course dealing with other nations, which is also quite familiar – you can request open borders, trade agreements, research sharing, and eventually alliances. The nations will also ask you for favors or present occasional narrative choices, though these too begin to repeat quickly in future games.

When negotiations break down, and sometimes without much reason, the enemy AI will declare war. They will fight each other, as well as the players, though often without much success. Declaring war costs Prestige in most cases, and casus belli may require you to specify a desired outcome, such as taking over a city. Wars are limited by the number of turns, and if the goals are not accomplished, no clear winner is declared (and thus no Prestige points gained). The AI will sometimes declare a skirmish and totally run you over with an overwhelming force, and at other times they will announce plans to invade a specific city, and yet not a single unit ever arrives. The politics of the AI are quite barebones and there's not much logic or political intrigue to worry about.

To defend your cities, or invade others, military units are needed. These come in familiar forms of spearmen, infantry, and eventually tanks and airplanes. Like Civilization, units have strengths and weaknesses against other specific units, so a balanced force is needed. One interesting concept is formations, which let you combine a few units in a specific way, increasing their effectiveness. For example, having two melee units up front and a ranged unit in the back. This formation then can get deployed at any city (though not one currently under attack, to prevent cheesing) .

Another somewhat unique aspect of Ara is that the turns are simultaneous. Meaning you're not making moves and then waiting for other players to do the same – everyone makes their decisions and places their structures at the same time, and then the turn advances for everyone. This becomes important in military conflicts, as there's no clear way to identify which army gets the advantage of attacking first – though the game does have some underlying initiative mechanics. Once the two army units enter battle, there is no way to retreat, and the game shows the predicted winner. While you can load into a 3D rendering of the scene, it's not particularly impressive, and you feel fairly helpless just watching a losing fight. Terrain, formations and other factors come into play, but generally the larger army will win, and the other will be fully wiped out. You can try to send extra units into battle if there is enough time, but the combat is typically resolved quite rapidly. Similarly, attacking cities is surprisingly fast too, with just a couple of turns needed to break down walls with a siege unit, and have your army units take over. This makes the game feel a bit fragile and high-stakes, needing to keep units stationed at key locations on the map.

Maintaining units costs more of those finite resources that can be produced and refined, and the game could do a better job of displaying when units are not being supplied. Their military strength drops in half, and some alerts come through the corner of the screen – but these are extremely easy to miss, especially with the constant bombardment of messages down there at every turn. Manoeuvring troops around the map is a bit awkward as well, as clicking on the zones and destinations can be surprisingly finicky. Sometimes they stack, and at other times they do not. The military deployment and formation UI could also have used more refinement. Your army size limit depends on your nation's growth, so you won't be wielding huge armies, even if you somehow have the resources to upkeep them.

With so much going on, simultaneous turns become a necessity as much as a feature. A normal single player game of 750 turns takes about 7 hours, which felt a bit too long, but it's because turns are longer due to how much you have to attend to. There is sadly no speed option, just the turn limit mentioned earlier. Having to deal with everything that needs attention during a turn in a typical 4X game – with the added micromanagement hell of resource and staff assignment – creates for some very long turns. And having to do all that and then waiting for others to do the same would have made for some impossibly long games – especially in multiplayer.

When playing online, the games are hosted in the cloud, meaning that the person who created the save file doesn't have to be online for the game to progress. Players can hot-join or leave and the AI will take over, and the host can carry on with the map. Still, while simultaneous turns provide more flexibility, it's a bit iffy when it comes to determining conflict outcomes, or whose scout reaches some free resources first. You can also join as many multiplayer matches as you want, and hop between them freely, which is certainly an interesting concept. Still, despite being billed as faster and more streamlined due to the turn design, it actually ends up being just as long due to all the inherent resource management mechanics. The game also supports up to a wild 36 nations on a map, both in solo and multiplayer, but that's more technically impressive than it is feasible to be enjoyable and coherent.

Ara features a fairly warm and slightly cartoon-ish art style, that's not too different from its genre competitors. The leader models are decently well rendered and animated, with a few looks for when they are happy or angry. But perhaps what differentiates the game is its level of map detail – you can zoom in to your cities and observe citizens working, and production humming along, which is a higher level of detail than usual. It gives the map a bit more of a lively feel. On the other hand, there was a scattering of some visual bugs and UI overlay issues, as well as the dreaded lag that begins to creep in for longer sessions, as is the sad tradition for 4X. At around 150-200 continuous turns, the game becomes almost unplayable due to its framerate and lag, and you need to save and restart it.

Ara: History Untold is a fairly good take on the Civ formula of historical 4X strategy. It borrows many concepts and mechanics from other games in the genre, and implements them with a decent level of polish and competency. It also has a big differentiating factor with the extensive resource management aspect – but this amount of micromanagement will only appeal to select few, and the game struggles to provide the tools necessary to make it more tolerable. The art style is pleasant and the more detailed views of the cities are nice, but not exactly groundbreaking, and there are typical performance issues during long sessions. The simultaneous turns are an interesting concept that becomes as much an innovation as it is a necessity. Perhaps that's as much of a compliment as can be given to a 4X game – it does grow engaging enough to warrant those long hours and long turns, but starting up new campaigns feels a bit like a chore knowing how much manual resource management you are about to do from scratch.

A digital code was provided by the publisher for the purposes of this review.