Review: Ara: History Untold Retreads Old Ground

Despite promising an “evolution in historical grand strategy,” Ara: History Untold is more of an iteration on the genre, and a fairly mild one at that. It takes Civilization‘s 4X formula and tweaks it, rather than totally reinventing it. It’s competent and Oxide Games is totally capable of getting its hooks into you as many of this genre’s forebears have, but this game fails to introduce the kind of interesting new decisions and mechanics it needs to stand out.

Though the name isn’t quite as pithy as “Civilization” or “Humankind,” 4X fans will slip into Ara: History Untold like an old glove. You found cities, research technologies, and send scouts or armies roving around the map fighting wars and picking up goodies. Where Ara attempts to differentiate itself is in its simultaneous turn system, irregularly shaped map regions, and a crafting system that lets you use tools and resources to boosts your production. More on those later, but first: the leaders.

You’ll be picking a leader from a decently sized pool of civilizations, though the mix is a little oddball. Around half are Civ staples like Liz I, Bismarck, Shaka Zulu, and Julius Caeser, which felt a little uninspired. But then the other half ditches the usual kings and generals for less typical choices like the scientist Nicolaus Copernicus, Korean freedom fighter Yu Gwan-sun, and Cherokee community developer Wilma Mankiller. My favorite was Sappho, the Greek poet and patron saint of Lesbianism.

It’s a good spread, but each of the leaders only has a single impactful bonus, along with a few minor buffs like a little extra gold in the capital or a slight boost to combat outside their borders. There are no unique units or buildings, or even that many card or unit art variants. The overall aesthetic direction also does the game few favors, landing in the awkward middle ground between stylized and realistic resulting in it mostly being forgettable.

Once you’ve picked your leader and loaded in, you’ll likely notice those irregular map regions. They give the world a more natural aesthetic to be sure, but Humankind did something similar back in 2021 while adding in a level of verticality that makes Ara look flat by comparison. These big, single areas also make traversing terrain less involved, as units traverse the whole region one at a time rather than being affected by rough terrain or forests.

Building works more interestingly, as each region is divided into a different number of zones that can take a single improvement each. Certain buildings or improvements can also buff certain others in the same region, so you’ll want to cram complimentary buildings into large regions with a lot of zones. Meanwhile, Wonders take up a whole region so you’ll ideally want to put them in smaller regions with only 2 or 3 zones. It’s a really nice idea that could let you build up specialized districts, but disappointingly the buffs usually only affect multiples of the same building rather than opening up a choice of synergies with others.

With a bunch of resource improvements and crafters built, you’ll be ready to dive into Ara: History Untold‘s most unique feature: the crafting system. Essentially, the bonus resources like horses or iron can be used to speed up production in your buildings, or crafted into further tools and amenities. Some of these can be used on cities to provide powerful bonuses, like flat city growth or increased science production. Housing improvements like Dwellings can be equipped with a wide array of items to add science or faith production, depending on what you need. Some Wonders and several units also require specific resources, both crafted and non-crafted, so having a robust manufacturing economy is important. Unfortunately, once you have that economy up and running it can VERY quickly become a chore. Micro-managing your factories’ inputs and outputs is less fun when you’ve got 20 or so different workshops by the end of the first big era.

Then there’s the simultaneous turns, which end up influencing the flow of gameplay a lot. Rather than directing each unit to move or act within the turn, you set the orders and they execute when you hit end turn. In theory, this means you line up all your plans and hit end turn to see them play out, your armies all marching out in sync. But in practice, it ends up making things feel unsatisfying and floaty, which is not what you’d expect from a turn-based strategy. Part of this is visual, your little soldiers are so small and covered up by badges that you don’t get that nice feedback of watching them march out at the same time. While other issues include the way it affects combat. Your units and the enemy’s need to meet each other on the same tile, so if you move into their tile and they move into another you will be chasing each other’s tail forevermore, to say nothing of how annoying this makes chasing fleeing units or those with more than one movement point per turn. It’s an interesting idea, but I cant give it points for originality since not only has it been used for multiplayer modes in Civ before but Humankind also already tried it in singleplayer with similar issues.

I keep bringing up competitors like Civilization and Humankind not just for obvious comparisons or to be cruel, but because Ara: History Untold sought to position itself as big mix up for historical strategy. And I want that! I love this genre, but only having a few big games flying that banner has led to it becoming a bit stale, and more competitors and new ideas could shake things up. But unfortunately, Ara doesn’t do much to really drive things forward. Most of the new additions have been tried before and the crafting system, the one actually unique part, fails to add much more than extra busywork and spreadsheeting. It’s still totally functional as a historical 4X, easily alluring me back into the one-more-turn mindset, but it doesn’t succeed in bringing much that is really new to the table.

Ara: History Untold is available on the PC via Steam, Xbox Game Pass, and the Windows store.