Ara: History Untold review – Rome alone

Like the empires of old, 4X games (“explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate”) have been on the rise lately. Hinging on strategic gameplay at a more relaxed, turn-based pace, the sub-genre has a new entry this week in the form of Ara: History Untold, a challenger to the likes of Sid Meier’s Civilization series. Developer Oxide Games, who previously worked on Ashes of the Singularity, hits the ground running with their latest release, as Ara looks gorgeous, allows you to rewrite history, and, most importantly, make your mark on the world. It’s not quite up to the incredibly high standard set by the Civilization games, but it’s an accessible entry for newcomers looking to try their hand at diplomacy.

There’s no question that Ara: History Untold is a sight to behold. It’s one of the best-looking 4X games out there. A trip through history is a treat for the eyes, especially when you’re aiming to examine your progress on both a micro and macro level. Whether you’re zooming in to observe your nation take its formative first steps forward, or pulling back the camera to check out your expansion in action, there’s a subtle joy in seeing all your progress rendered so vividly. Small details help make the game feel alive, while pivotal moments like battles with rival nations can play out with well-executed simulations, giving your world a sense of life and purpose.

If the visuals draw you into Ara: History Untold, then the gameplay does a fine job of sinking its hooks into you. City-building revolves around claiming multi-zone regions and plonking your buildings down in them, a process that requires deft organisational skills to maximize the full potential of your land. It’s mutual back-scratching pushed to an extreme level, as you’ll get the best bonuses when you group your buildings by category and create districts to focus on specific tasks.

This is an idea that has been explored in other titles before, but to Ara’s credit, it aims to make this part of the game feel and look more organic. Other staples of the genre are present–resource-gathering, growth, diplomacy, and conflict–as you work to evolve your nation from stone-chucking hominids into a post-human species of the Singularity Era. This is where Ara makes some changes to the established formula, starting with an all-encompassing goal of earning as much Prestige as possible.

Essentially an overall score that tracks multiple achievements in fields of culture, science, religion, military prowess, and more, the nation that has the highest Prestige score at the end of a game is declared the winner. The idea behind this system is that it pushes you to experience all of Ara instead of leveraging a specific strategy, allowing you to evolve branching paths for your society and not feel like you’ve wasted valuable resources. You’re still free to focus on becoming a military superpower or a commerce giant, but if you’d like to start a side-hustle of religious investment, you won’t feel penalized for doing so.

Just be aware that it’s an effort to be the best civilisation in multiple fields of study, and Ara can be merciless toward poor performers. A typical game has three acts, each one comprising four eras for you to progress through. It’s a race against time to not only improve your nation but to avoid becoming a lost culture as players in the bottom 25% of the game are removed entirely – their lands and works left to be annexed by surviving societies. It’s worth pointing out that this is an optional feature, but it does add a nice sense of creeping danger to motivate you.

Inevitably, you’re going to butt heads with another country when it decides to expand its borders, and this is an area of the game where Ara feels weak. There are a few interesting ideas to experiment with and battles do look fascinating as they play out, but overall, conflict feels flat and limited in its design. It becomes a numbers game where not even the most ingenious guerrilla tactics can make a difference, and strategic opportunities to use the land to your advantage are barely present.

If you’d prefer a more diplomatic situation, the game also falters on this side as its roster of 36 leaders are devoid of personality, negotiations lack the quid-pro-quo flexibility you’d expect for the genre, and relationships between nations can deteriorate annoyingly fast. Frankly, Civilization does it better. That said, it’s early days for Ara: History Untold and it has a distinct and appealing foundation to build on.

Ara: History Untold is out on 24 September for PC. It’s also available to play day one with Xbox’s PC Game Pass.