Ara: History Untold Review: A Bold, Ambitious 4X Held Back by Flaws

Shape the world your way in ARA: History Untold. A historical 4X that has you lead your chosen people through the ages - going from scraping together two bits of stone, to splitting the atom. 

This steps away from the pack in several key ways. It uses simultaneous turns to keep warfare unexpected. City development is in the forefront and cities will sprawl across the map. There’s a huge focus on resources, production chains and creating an individual industrial economy. You’ve got to make do with the tools you have, or go out and pilfer them from your neighbour. 

There’s a constant struggle for prestige - the game’s scoring metric. Every action and achievement awards points - and those who slip behind will be culled - eliminated from the match at breakpoints. It’s a dynamic bottleneck that squeezes out the underperformers, leading to a final confrontation between the remaining superpowers. 

The studio - Oxide Games - boasts real pedigree with this sort of thing, with several of the developers playing key roles in Civ 5’s development. But this is a very different direction. Familiar, but with enough new spins to make it feel like a big step forward. 

But are its new takes enough to grant it a foothold, or will this be forgotten to time? Let’s have a dig into ARA: History Untold.

Discovery and Direction

Given we’re in 4X territory, I figured the best way to go about this review was to split the game into its key pillars. Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exterminate. Let’s start with the first X. 

Exploration is - of course - a huge part of the game. From rudimentary beginnings you're faced with countless unknowns for your budding people. As your scouts chart the surrounding areas you’ll discover treasures and wild beasts. Little by little you’ll tame the lands, stocking supplies to fuel your early game.

Resources litter the land, and in ARA - they’re important. These aren’t just passive yields bonuses. Each of them can be used in various ways. As you develop, you’ll start to discover new ones - and over the course of the game, a seemingly barren region may become filled to the brim with crucial materials. 

Given the sheer quantity of resources - you can’t hope to do everything. What you have around you will shape your direction. You can’t create a budding wine industry without access to grapes for example. I do like this approach. It made the resources feel impactful, and meant your surroundings really matter when picking your path of advancement.

That drip feeding of discovery continues through the game. As the world moves into new eras, underperforming civs will drop off and be forgotten to time. This replaces their lands with ruins for you to chart and explore. Again, big fan of this. Opening a new avenue of exploration later in the game is great - however it didn’t function that differently from the opening gambit.

The game worlds themselves are very solid. It ships with some well-balanced pregen maps - each with built in choke points to create interesting gameplay. The random gen created some striking worlds, but I did have issues with the actual set up of it. Maybe I’m a stupid person, but I don’t know what the axial tilt of Jupiter is - and how that would have an impact on a 4X game map. 

More transparency with the set up options, as well as an option to shuffle settings here and there would go a long way.

Building Your Empire

But anyway, back to the 4X pillars. Once you’ve explored, found a nice nook somewhere, it’s time to dig in and expand. 

ARA takes a region approach in the game - and despite my fervent love for hexagons - I’m okay with this. Each region is split into subsections - possibly containing a resource. Certain buildings function better when placed together - say your industry buildings. Others provide bonuses to groups - for instance, you can place a windmill to boost the rest of your farms in a region.

There’s a balancing act of keeping food, resources and industry ticking - whilst also meeting the demands of your people. They have several key metrics which can be boosted with amenities and buildings. Ignoring these upsets your people, and attaches negative modifiers to a city. 

You can influence your population further with religion - which lets you consistently stack bonuses as you gain more followers. It’s not a hugely deep system, but it has a big impact on the game. If you really want to flex your might, you can build wonders. These take up a lot of space, but have some powerful bonuses - not to mention a big boost to your prestige. Get a few of these built and you can ensure you won’t slip into irrelevance during the chapter cullings. 

As you grow, expand, and progress, your cities will start to annex more regions, and spread across the map. Here’s one area the game really excels, doing something I’ve not seen before.

Everything you build, it all connects together and creates a living world. You’ll see people on the streets, working in the fields, celebrating at the opening of a wonder. It’s incredibly impressive and immersive, and it’s great to have a sense of scale for your accomplishments. Makes it feel more like a simulation, and less like a board game.

However, as imposing as the open ended building system is - it comes with some drawbacks. As you advance, you’re always unlocking new buildings and possibilities - which is great. Out with the old, in with the new. But the simple act of upgrading or replacing is laborious. You’re trying to find something in an ever growing list of buildings - and it slows everything down. Now I’m not going to dive too deep into that whole area right now, but hold on to that thought - I’ll return there soon. 

Let’s move on to the game’s next pillar. Exploitation.

Harnessing the Land

As I said, there is an expansive list of resources available throughout a game - and every single one has several uses. Once harvested, materials can be used in recipes to create this or that. If you’re missing something, you can substitute it for a fee - or trade with another power. 

Trading lets you make supply routes to access either materials or finished products. I do like the way this is set up, though the whole system could definitely do with another few layers. Both this and diplomacy are fairly thinly veiled.

You take a resource, and you refine it. Then you can feed it into something else, and potentially something else further. There are so many options for nearly every item, with an abundance of potential finished products. Some of them can provide lasting bonuses to your city. Some can be given to citizens to provide lifestyle boons. And some are used in creating other buildings, units or wonders. It’s all interconnected, and all very elaborate.

As you advance through scientific milestones, you’ll unlock better ways to draw raw materials out of the ground, more efficient methods to refine them - and invent ingenious new doodads to turn them into. These can then be fed back into the system to make your current industry buildings yet more efficient. Everything looping around and creating that sort of Factorio-brain circuit of logistics that you don’t often get in these sorts of games.

And I am a huge fan of this again - but there’s another big problem. It suffers from the same issue as the building. A system plagued by a troublesome user experience. But once more, I’m not going to open that can of worms right now, first, I want to finish off my four Xs - let’s talk about Exterminate.

Warfare Unleashed

Warfare is a cornerstone of ARA: History Untold - but like any 4X, you can take as much or as little of it as you want. Once more we’re going into unfamiliar territory here with some bold innovations. The big one is simultaneous turns. Rather than the standard back and forth, everyone queues their movements at the same time, and then they resolve. This leads to some unexpected consequences. The army you’re expecting to stand and fight might scarper, or you may get ambushed en route to reinforce your main army.

You aren’t constantly pumping units out into the field - but building a reserve. Here, you organise them into battalions - and different combinations have varying effects. There’s a balancing act here. You can save on maintenance costs by keeping your units in reserve - though when things kick off it’ll take a few turns to muster. If your opponent employs a bit of the ol’ Blitzkrieg warfare, you can be caught off guard.

This happens more than you think. There isn’t just a switch to turn war on or off. You have to have a goal in mind. Capture this city, for instance. Sure, you can take the scenic route and hit up as many other objectives along the way - but if you succeed in your goal, the war is over. Initially I had complaints about the AIs tendency to forward settle, until I realised that’s a situation that can be turned on its head. I can have my army ready, declare war on that as the target - and conquer the city. All in a matter of turns. As I’d completed my primary goal, the war was won, and I got a healthy prestige boost. It makes aggressive forward settling a risk, and keeps you always wary that an attack can come swiftly and decisively. 

I really like this system. Doing everything simultaneous leads to some interesting situations - and it has the added benefit that there is no delay between turns. The game is always moving. Given the sheer number of units, I can see this being a very entertaining 4X when played with a wargame focus. Now there are some balancing issues, and some logical counters that don’t exist - but some fine tuning here and there will work wonders. All in all, this was a really refreshing, very enjoyable part of the game.

Where the Game Excels

And despite my rumblings of complaints - there are several things the game does very well. It has a strong sense of personality, and the sound and visual design is great. The ability to get up close and personal to your developing nation is completely novel and really well implemented. The gathering of prestige means every little thing you do contributes to the greater goal, and there’s events that spring up every few turns - each with a little bit of historical context. I love historical context.

As I just mentioned, simultaneous turns and the warfare system, both really strong cases in this game’s favour. And as you develop, you can choose to skip some research nodes, losing potential options in favour of getting to the next age faster. It’s a game of endless little choices that really puts you in the reigns of a leader of people. And every game, those choices steer you in very different ways. 

The resource focused side, I am fully onboard with. I do really love that sort of thing, but it highlights the game’s unavoidable glaring problem. And yes, I’m ready to talk about it. How much I hate the UI & UX.

Frustrations and Flaws

This is a very pretty game, okay, no denying that. But no matter how much panache, character and eye candy you’ve got - it cannot save you from a bad user experience. None of that matters if the player is fighting against the game just to play it. It is, for me, one of the most important parts of a strategy game - and ARA is an example as to why. 

Every time you progress, you unlock more buildings. You have yet more to scroll through to find the improvement you want. Each city has several different building views, and you’re wrestling between them just trying to do something simple like upgrade a district.

Getting a new recipe to craft, discovering a new resource, having upgraded infrastructure to play with - none of it is exciting ‘cos it means fighting against the UI and dealing with the cumbersome city layout. It may sound like I’m being dramatic, but if you have to click 4, 5, 6 times to do a simple thing, and you’re expected to do that simple thing multiple times each turn - in a game that lasts several hundred turns. You’re going to get frustrated. You’re going to feel like ‘surely there was a better way to do this?’

But there were other issues that annoyed me. As you go through the ages, players at the bottom get culled. On paper, I’m with this. But when you get to higher difficulties, the AI is balanced by giving them bonuses to prestige. I was counting it turn by turn, and I could see no way they were earning those numbers. Essentially then, you’re at the bottom trying to keep up, trying to reach figures that you know are artificially inflated. That’s not fun.

There’s also a big question of balance. I noticed it in warfare, but it’s also prevalent with the bonuses, the resources, the goods. To be fair to the devs, there are so many different things to balance, and I’d be shocked if there aren’t a lot of tweaks and changes made early into the game’s life. But it’s a factor that - along with my other issues - I think could have been solved by an intensive closed beta period for the game. 

One overarching feeling I had playing, and it seeps into all my complaints - was that nothing ever gets streamlined. You have these big dramatic chapter changes where players get dropped. The world changes. But really, it doesn’t. All that happens is more gets stacked on top. It doesn’t get more difficult. It gets more tiring. There’s no feeling of a turning point. No excess weight is ever shed. You don’t hit that lightning in a bottle moment and feel like a huge step forward for your people. You think ‘great, now I’ve got to go and manually upgrade every single one of my farms one by one ‘cos I’ve invented tractors’.

A Promising Miss

Now I know that’s a lot of negativity. I’d be lying if I said those were all things I could overlook. It really held back my enjoyment of the game, which is such a shame because I do think this is a good game. There’s so much promise here, and so many systems I really do like - they’re just bogged down by silly, fixable issues.

There’s so much good there. The visuals. The sense of personality. The attention to detail and atmosphere and warfare and depth of resources. They’ve gone to great lengths to make this feel like more than just a historical 4X game. It’s all there. But the vehicle to actually enjoy it is flawed.

The core of the game isn’t broken. In fact, it’s incredibly robust. It’s something that I want to - and probably will - keep playing. But it’s being heavily hampered by the game’s top layer. I do believe this can be something special, It just needs more work. And if that happens, I’ll happily eat my words, throw my hands up, and sing its praises.

‘Cos there’s a very impressive, very captivating game here somewhere. It’s just stuck in a swamp of some questionable design choices.