The 4X genre of video games is older than modern gaming itself, dating back to the early 1980s and predating the release of Nintendo’s NES. In the four decades since that time, gaming has evolved massively; from the early days of 2D sprites and pixel graphics to the modern showpieces featuring fully realized 3D open worlds, it’s hardly recognizable. 4X games have changed, too, moving on from the flat worlds, characters, and full-motion videos into highly detailed units, buildings, and environments with ever increasing depth of game design. Ara: History Untold, from Oxide Games and published by Xbox Game Studios, seeks to move that one step further, by creating a living world where it’s not just units, buildings, and cities on the map, but your whole civilization in motion all at once. Does Oxide Games accomplish its lofty goal? Let’s find out.
Learning from History
From the outset of playing Ara, it’s impossible not to think of the current king of the 4X genre, Sid Meier’s Civilization, given that the studio was founded by the lead development team behind Civilization’s fifth mainline entry, Civilization V. The startup process will be familiar to any who have played the beloved franchise, where you pick a historical figure who represents a nation, and each figure has specific attributes impacting the gameplay. The game offers a wide variety of historical figures, from Wu Zetian of China to Shaka of the Zulu, Elizabeth I of England, and Wilma Mankiller of the Cherokee. I played my first game, from start to finish, as George Washington, whose perks included things like +1 to movement speed to units in certain formations, but whose main downside was “Golden Ages” lasted 50% fewer turns. Examining each figure, it was surprising to see how unbalanced some of them are, as many of them have no downsides like Washington, and some have a plethora of huge perks.
Once your leader is selected, you move into the screen where you set your map, game difficulty, and other general settings for the world you’re about to explore. There are basic settings and pre-set maps for those who want to jump right in, along with a decent number of options for those looking to generate a new world and customize things like the number of turns, the level of the oceans, number of nations, and style of the land masses. The options give you a nice amount of freedom, but they could use a better description of what each type is; for example, defining what “Fractal Coasts” or “World Spine” would look like in a map, and a single “randomize everything” option, would have been nice. I kept the basics for my first game, playing the “Viscount” difficulty, the recommend normal mode, and left it with a small map on twin continents with 8 nations. With my leader and map decided, I jumped into the game to see what Ara had in store.
Starting out, the first thing I noticed was there’s no opportunity to move where my first city is settled, the game places you on the map and you start with a Scout unit. Leaving the game’s tutorial on, I follow the basic instructions on how to move my Scout, how to start construction in the city, and what to build from my limited options. The early part of the tutorial is very helpful and really orients the player in the right direction, explaining how to move the camera and zoom in and out, all the basics that are standard across the genre but would be very welcoming for someone who hasn’t played a game like this before. What’s immediately apparent is how similar the UI is to the recent Civilization games, with popup notifications on the right side of the screen each turn and the various menus with a list of technologies and other nations. But there’s a reason for this, and that’s because it’s a good design.
What’s unique about the technology is that there’s no “tech tree” as 4X players would be familiar with, but rather “Eras” and “Acts.” The technology list allows players to research any technology they want, so long as it’s available in the current Era. And then, once you’ve reached a certain technology level, you can research the “Era Catalyst” to progress Eras, but if you do that without researching all prior technologies, you lose access to them forever. However, all unlocked units, amenities, buildings, etc. are available from multiple technologies throughout the Eras and Acts; if you missed it in Ancient History, maybe you can grab it in the Machine Age. It’s a gambit: do I want to push ahead with technology to have access to stronger units and more efficient buildings and risk not having a key unlockable for the next hundred turns, or do I clear the list before moving on? I appreciate the question being posed, but on the Viscount difficulty, I never felt the need to skip a technology. That said, on higher difficulties with more aggressive AI, that calculation should probably change, lest you risk getting crushed by a more technologically advanced nation that decided that they’d rather have muskets to shoot you with than paper to write you a nastily-worded letter.
Acts transition only when a certain number of nations have reached the technological Era to begin the new Act, and that number changes based on the total number of nations. When the number has been reached, the nations below the threshold number of “Prestige” are “lost to time,” and it’s game over for them. There are three Acts in total, each with four technological Eras in each Act, and at the end of Act 3, the nation with the highest Prestige wins. It’s straightforward in its concept: accomplish things in the game that give you Prestige, have higher Prestige than the other nations, and have the highest Prestige by the end to win. The question here, and Ara’s true differentiator from other 4X games, is, “How is Prestige earned?” The answer: basically everything you do earns Prestige.
Victory Through Superior Management
Traditional 4X games have multiple paths to victory, usually called “victory conditions” or some variation thereof, and so you focus on one type of victory, such as technology, religious, cultural, military, economic, or the like. Typically, this would force the player to focus on a single path to victory and dedicate the game to that pursuit, but Ara attempts to upend that by allowing everything you do to give you Prestige in one form or another. It’s a clever idea, but, unfortunately, it’s just not balanced at launch. In my Washington game, I was a close second by the end of the first Act, but at the end of the second Act I was more than 2x ahead of the next closest person, and, through multiple technology Eras ahead by the end of Act 3 and the game, I was more than 10x the second-place finisher. The numbers from which Prestige is coming are hard to understand in the game’s information screens, but I believe the vast majority of it came from building “Triumphs” in my cities (this game’s equivalent of “Wonders,” like the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower). Once I realized in Act 2 that I was a bit behind, I decided to focus on Triumphs as much as possible, and, before I knew it, I blew past the rest of the AI.
Speaking of Triumphs, let’s talk about building in Ara. Building improvements and units with your cities is the key to expansion and the primary gameplay element of Ara, and Oxide clearly put a lot of time, energy, and care into fleshing out the building system. The map is laid out in “Regions,” ranging from 1-5 zones, and each zone can house one Improvement built by the city, or one Region can use all of its zones, no matter how many it has, to host a single Triumph. There are 5 things a city can build throughout the game: “Improvements,” “Triumphs,” Specialists,” “Units,” and “Special Projects.” Improvements primarily consist of harvesters and crafters, which bring in resources like food, wood, and metals, or they build items with those resources, respectively. And there are a lot of Improvements, numbering 66 by my count at the end of the game, while Special Projects had no more than 2, and Units were 44.
The game removes extremely outdated improvements and units like stone pits and spearmen as you progress, but it could do a much better job making it easier to sort through. The filtering system is a mess because you can only sort by those five categories, and they are vastly different in number of options removed. Ideally, you could sort by Improvement or Unit type, like crafter or harvester, land or air, or search for Improvements that specifically bolster something you need, like finding wealth generating Improvements. None of this is game breaking, but the little annoyances add up together and over time.
Once it’s time to build an Improvement, you select the Region with the right resources, such as selecting a high food Region for farms, high Timber region for logging camps, and so on. Specific zones in Regions will have specific resources, too, such as fish, which can be fished for fish or tallow “Goods,” which are resources that your nation stores, or for the more general food, “Essential Resource.” And you can swap between the three options at any time, with the change taking effect next turn. There are a lot of resources that have this option, like rice, which can be farmed for rice grain or for food, and rock salt can be mined for salt or, with the right technology later on, aluminum. It’s a nifty system, one with flexibility in the choices you make as the player, which was a big focus of Oxide when developing this game.
The problem comes in that there are almost too many resources, with 49 “Natural Resources” on the map, which turns into 45 “Harvested” Goods, and it doesn’t always make sense why some resources can be used for certain things but not others. Why can fish be fish, food, or tallow, but live hogs are only live hogs or tallow, not food? Live hogs are used to make cured meat at a Butcher, one of the Crafter Improvements, but Crafter Improvements take Craft Production, which is determined by what other Improvements you’ve built and some additional factors, to be effective. So, when your city is starving, which mine were regularly, and you’ve got a stockpile of live hogs but you can’t use them for food, the game’s logic starts to break down.
Crafter Improvements have a similar breakdown as Harvester Improvements with their own subcategories. There are two additional subsets of Goods, called “Crafted Ingredients” and “Consumables” available. Crafted Ingredients are things used to craft Consumables, Units, and Triumphs, such as wheels or metal ingots, while Consumables are items that can be consumed over a certain number of turns as Amenities to improve your citizens’ quality of life, or not consumed as a “Supply,” which both helps make your Crafter Improvements build faster by increasing their Craft Production, and completely misleads the player because I was into Act 3 before I realized my Consumables did not get consumed when used as Supplies. There are a total of 91 Consumables and 21 Crafted Ingredients in the game. Adding that together with the harvest-related items brings you to a grand total of 206, or 211 if you count Essential Resources food, materials, timber, and wealth.
Like I said, Oxide put a lot of care into developing this system. It is by far the most in-depth crafting I have ever experienced in a 4X game, but there’s just too much; Ara’s closest competitor, Civilization VI, has a total of 52 resources across the entire game. There will undoubtedly be people who love this level of granularity in the crafting, but when you’re building and expanding an empire, managing every Factory, Butcher, Bakery, Library, Foundry, and many other Crafter Improvements every turn to make sure you have what you need to produce to ensure that it’s being produced at all times is just too into the weeds.
Expanding Your Empire
While we’re on the topic of expansion, let’s talk about individual city expansion and settling new cities. Expansion of an existing city is done by a system in which you generate a “Claim” by growing the population and selecting a new Region to own. It’s a clever system, one that is directly influenced by population and easy to understand when you’re going to be expanding. Unfortunately, that’s the only method to expand the borders without founding a new city; there’s no purchasing new Regions or building Improvements that expand your borders. Sometimes, it can lead to tough choices on where to go next, but others, it’s frustrating because when you’re out of buildable zones, your city is stuck building Units or Special Projects, and that’s it.
Founding a new city is simple enough, as well. A minor investment of some Essential Resources builds a Settler, and you then examine the map for the location you would like to settle. The game provides you with a general rating system regarding if a location is good or not, but you can make your own determination based on whatever you want, such as a resource you’re desperate for despite the city being in a desert. Or choose a location between your neighbor’s two cities just to screw with him. You have the freedom to go anywhere, and I found no restrictions, such as being too close to another city. You construct roads between your cities with a convenient “Manage Roads” option by just clicking on your starting point city and ending point city, and then the roads build themselves over time. Interestingly, there’s no choice here besides the cities, so sometimes the roads being built aren’t the most efficient ones, they’ll just link up to the road system in existence; probably historically accurate, but some freedom to place my own roads would have been appreciated.
Additionally, there’s a soft cap on the number of cities that you are allowed to possess, starting at 3 and going up with specific Improvements and your choice of government, which range from tribal to one of a half dozen or so selections. Each government has its perks and downsides while letting you set your tax rate, which has a direct impact on not only your wealth, but also on your citizens’ “Quality of Life.” “Quality of Life” is a collection of stats related to how your citizens feel, from knowledgeable, security, happiness, and a couple more. The goal with Quality of Life is to keep it high so the citizens produce more, either through research, production, wealth, etc., or provide stronger military Units. Going over the city cap decreases the Quality of Life slightly across all of the stats, but I found going one over wasn’t overwhelming and well worth the extra city, on occasion.
One of the benefits of additional cities is that there are Improvements that are limited to a specific number, sometimes across the nation and sometimes by city. Improvements limited by city are often things that only impact that city, but when it’s an Improvement like Library or University, it’s contributing to building Goods that are limited to production in just those buildings, and an increase of knowledge, which increases your research rate of new technologies.
Nationally-limited buildings are extremely valuable because they produce exclusive Goods, such as the Grocer, which produces canned food, or the Printer, which prints newspapers. I can understand a slight restriction on them, but I do believe they would have benefited from a higher cap than one per nation simply because important Goods are exclusive to them, and they tend to produce them very slowly, even with Supplies and in cities with good production levels. The main issue with nationally-limited buildings is that, once they’re built, there’s no way to see that they’re limited nationally again because the game’s encyclopedia, called the “Encarta,” does not tell you. Only the build screen in the city tells you the number that a particular Improvement is limited to; I spent a while wondering why I couldn’t build a second Grocer until it clicked that it must have been national and I didn’t realize it, but I could not find that information in the Encarta.
The Encarta is actually a great tool not only for new players, but also for me, with dozens of hours in the game. Even writing this review, I referenced it to make sure I understood core concepts correctly. It’s filled with loads of information that will help players understand the game in finer detail than the tutorials can teach you.
Cracks in the Foundation
There are some issues, however, in that I believe some aspects of the Encarta could be clearer or use better explanations, like with the buildings issue mentioned a moment ago or the aforementioned confusion over Supplies not consuming Consumables. Additionally, Improvements do not state on their building page or description where they can be built; e.g., if a solar plant needs to be built in a desert Region or zone, the only way to find out is to try to build it and hover the mouse cursor over the map and read it there because it’s not in the Improvement’s description. Similarly, “Paragons” that you recruit, who are other great historical people who serve as your advisors or people who can craft “Masterpieces” for you, have stats and bonuses only visible when you recruit them or when they’re actively serving in a role; these are not on their Encarta page. So, it’s an extremely useful resource, but Oxide should really include some more gameplay-oriented information in it.
Paragons, as mentioned, serve as advisors, providing buffs to various parts of your Nation, such as increasing research or production. But they can also serve as commanders for your military units and as crafters of Masterpieces. “Masterpieces” are books, works of art, music, and other cultural items that provide Prestige upon creation and can eventually be placed on display for additional Prestige per turn; they’re very powerful. Paragons, themselves, are powerful in their military role, too, providing bonuses like extra movement. One turn of extra movement can make the difference between your city surviving an attack and being captured and destroyed.
The military and combat of Ara is relatively standard for the genre, but it works well and holds its own. You build your Units, and when they’re on the map, they fight and deal damage to a health bar. And, thankfully, the Units can stack on one another. One really cool thing is they have battle videos available that you can watch after a battle has happened, if for no reason other than seeing a cool little fighting animation.
I have three gripes with the military side of the game. First, the Units, while they are on the map physically, are tiny. So, when moving them around, I’m usually watching the still image representing the Unit move across the map. Second, you need to deploy Units to use them, and you deploy them from reserves, where all Units wait until needed. But you cannot un-deploy them. Once deployed, they’re on the map forever, unless you disband them and throw away the resources used to craft them. When I built my soldiers requiring the gunpowder Good for production and maintenance, I was losing gunpowder per turn despite not actively using the Unit, and I had no way to prevent that other than disbanding it. Third, there’s no upgrade for Units, meaning your spearman will be a spearman until he dies or you disband him; there is no upgrade to pikeman or the like.
What’s not quite so cool or doesn’t work as well as the military system is religion. The religion system is another of Ara’s that has some good basics and a good structure, but it needs some work to bring it together. You found a religion in this game by building one of many different Improvements, or even a few Triumphs, and then you pick “Religious Verses” for your religion, which essentially serve as buffs to your people. Some of them are very powerful, like producing more food or increasing how quickly cities grow, but some are minimal, depending on how you want to play the game. The problem with religion in Ara is that that’s where it ends. Spreading your religion relies on some unknown formula of religious spread distance and religious spread strength to determine how far and quickly it will spread, but you can’t tell how far it’s going to spread on its own without counting the Regions based on the information provided. So while the buffs are strong, the system itself isn’t very engaging.
Unfortunately, that brings us to the worst part of Ara. In a game that’s full of good things that are hamstrung by annoyances or good ideas that aren’t quite fleshed out as much as they should be (or too much, in the case of crafting), we have the most broken and pointless system in the game: diplomacy. Now, diplomacy is hard in any 4X game, but it genuinely feels like Oxide added diplomacy because it’s a checkbox on the 4X genre checklist. I’ll start with the one good aspect of it, and that’s trading. There’s a lot of Goods and resources in this game, and trading is a way to get things you’re short on or do not have in your nation, and you trade with other nations. The problem is, it’s tied to the diplomacy system.
Ostensibly, there’s an “Established Relationship” number that each nation has with other nations, and your relationship is supposed to go up and down based on what you do. You always passively work towards that number, but that number is meaningless. First, your interactions with other nations are limited to trading, research agreement, alliance, give gift, manage borders (open or close them), denounce, declare war, and…that’s it. You can only trade with a nation if you have a road to their cities, and the borders have to be open. However, what any AI nation does at any given time is entirely random. I had an ally break our alliance and denounce me, then declare war a few turns later. I had allies close their borders and break our trade agreements. Heck, I was involved in a war, and it wouldn’t even let me call the ally in for help! The research agreements are minimally beneficial, especially if you’re ahead in technologies researched. Whenever I requested that a nation open its borders, not once did it agree to do so. Only when they would propose alliances did borders open, most of the time only to be closed by the alliance proposer in the not-so-distance future. There was the occasional trade agreement that would last for a long time, but that was the extreme minority. I’m not sure how long the passive drift in relationship was supposed to take, but the AI nations completely ignored it. I’m sorry to say, but diplomacy in Ara is broken.
The coolest side of diplomacy doesn’t even involve nations, but the Tribes that exist in the game from the Ancient Era until the end of Act 1. They have a relationship meter with you, and if you raise it to the max and make them loyal, they can join you, granting you different boosts, such as a large population influx or some Goods, before the tribe disbands afterward. They disband no matter what at the end of Act 1, and there’s no control over event popup frequency that gives you opportunities to engage with the Tribes, but, like many things in Ara, it’s a good idea that needs to be developed a bit more.
The same goes for the events that popped up in Act 3, after events seemingly disappeared altogether in Act 2. Act 1’s Tribal events and Act 3’s events are all based off of real-world events that took place. And the event system gives you a brief paragraph of the event it’s based on, which is really neat and fun to read as a history buff, but, in the end, there are no consequences besides just picking the outcome that gives you the best stuff. The history side of Ara is one of my favorite parts, as Oxide did a lot of research to describe the historical figures that lead these nations, the different Paragons, and the events in a way that accurately represents the real world while recognizing that you’re playing a game emulating them. It’s a nice touch, and I’m glad they put in the work to add it.
It’s a Beautiful World
From a presentation perspective, Ara includes other complimentary touches as well including the voice over that narrates many aspects of the game, like the summary of each historical figure, some parts of the events, and a few other things. It’s a nice performance in English, and they’ve got a number of languages supported, not just with text but with voice over, too. Oxide really went the extra mile in some of these “nice to haves” that other games in the genre do not, and I applaud them for it. The accompanying music is nice, too. It’s calming and allows you to focus without being too bombastic and distracting, even during war. Every move of the mouse over things in a city’s build screen list has a little ding sound associated with the movement, just faint enough to hear when the music has receded. The high quality in the sound design adds just that little bit more to the game that, if you weren’t looking for it, you may not notice it’s there. But you’d definitely feel it if it was gone.
The game’s art style is very pretty, ensuring that the maps and the buildings all look beautiful. There’s a lot of detail in the different environments and they all have different impacts on gameplay, such as the types of resources available. It’s fun to see the buildings and cities change over time, when you zoom in close enough to see them.
Ara is a beastly game in terms of its technical performance because of what it’s trying to achieve. The most impressive part is the simultaneous turns system that Ara employs because, when you hit the end turn button, you’re right back into the action with no delay while the AI is taking its turns. It keeps the game moving at a great pace. The fact that there are millions of little people all living their lives in the game is incredible. There’s not a lot of AI going on in them; if you zoom in, you’ll see them just doing the same tiny animations, but the core idea is cute, and it can be fun to see. That said, I do think that some of the technical issues I experienced would have been reduced without that, but I understand that it’s probably something Oxide feels makes their game unique, and it does! I just don’t think it’s necessarily worth the cost because this is a 4X game. It’s a turn-based strategy game where I’m looking at the world, and I’m only zoomed in so far that I can see the people specifically to see the people. It’s a nicety, but it would be good to have a way to reduce the load on the PC if I want to focus on the mechanics of the game instead of the extras like that.
Ara’s control scheme is fairly intuitive, with everything functioning exactly as I would expect it to when playing a game of this type. There’s a very nice selection of accessibility options, too, including scaling the UI up and some high contrast modes for text, but resource icons on the map can blend in and are hard to see. It should be noted that I have a red/green colorblindness, and there are no colorblind options in this build. Hopefully, they’ll add that in the future, but, at the moment, it’s hard to spot some resources sometimes. Plus, there’s no way to filter resources like the crafting menu; you just have to find them on the map, or, if you have a Harvester Improvement, find the Improvement in your city’s screen. There is currently no controller support native to the game, but this is a PC exclusive release, so that is to be expected. There is also a multiplayer mode that I did not manage to put time into due to the limited nature of the review period.
Almost Triumphant
Ara: History Untold winds up being a mixed bag that doesn’t quite reach the lofty heights it had set its sights on, but the future for the game looks bright. The foundations of this game are truly great, and you can tell that there’s a talented team behind it with some good ideas and some vision. The team at Oxide has plans for major post-launch support. And, while I have no idea what they have in store, they have a good base of a game to work with, so I truly hope that they manage to build on what they have released here. Oxide has done an honorable job in producing Ara: History Untold, and I look forward to seeing how they can fix the problems and elevate this game.
Thank you to Xbox for providing a review code of ARA: History Untold. You can find Seasoned Gaming’s review policy here.
For reference, I played ARA on my PC featuring a i9-13900K, RTX 4090, 32GBs of RAM, and I ran the game at 4K with max settings the whole time. In my first game, it usually ran pretty well, but there were some times where the game would start losing frames badly, to the point where I needed to restart. Most of the time, I sat around 40-70 frames, depending on the level of zoom. But during those occasions where it was bad, it was running around 15-25 frames and would noticeably lag when clicking. In my second game, playing as Sejong the Great of Korea, where I added a larger map and many more nations, the performance was regularly taking a hit, around 30-35 frames.
I did experience a couple of crashes to the desktop, and the game crashed itself on closing it out a few times, but there was no interference to saved progress because the autosave system is generous and customizable. Additionally, I think the “Goals” tab, which is where you are given some specific tasks to accomplish to get bonus Prestige, is broken at the moment. Sometimes it showed me goals, but other times it was just empty, despite having had a goal pop up on the screen as something to accomplish; one issue was it gave me a goal to build a Triumph that I had already built, and it never gave me credit for having built it. It’s not a huge issue since the Goals are such a small part of the game, and I expect it to be fixed by Oxide for launch.