Ara: History Untold review – A fresh and gripping mix of city-builder and 4X

Oxide and Microsoft deliver an incredibly intriguing take on the genre

Oxide Interactive / Microsoft

Describing the core differences between Ara: History Untold and most other turn-based strategy games ultimately comes down to a slight variation in the questions they ask players. Most of the genre’s representatives ask “Do you want more production?” and the answer is “Yes” – why wouldn’t you want more production? It’s the most crucial resource in any of these games and the question is completely rhetorical.

In Ara, the fact that you want more production is already accepted by the developers, so they ask a different, actually interesting question: “What kind of production would you want more of?”

This would be silly in most other genre entries because the only type of production they have is a generic value telling you how fast you can build stuff. Ara does have such an abstract stat, too, but that’s not at all what the question is about. No, the question is asking whether you want to get more Blacksmiths, because your current production of Metal Bars isn’t keeping up with demand, or whether you want to build another Granary to produce Grain Store, as your new city could use the boost to growth. It’s asking if you want to add a completely new wing to your economy, such as a weaving industry to exploit those cotton resources you just discovered. But in that case you may want to get some Crafting Guilds first, because your need for Metal Tools will rise. Oh, but that brings us back to that Metal Bar shortage. And what’s that? I can build Furniture now?

See, Ara: History Untold looks like a normal turn-based 4X strategy game on the surface, and it certainly is part of that genre, but just below that beautiful exterior is an ocean of city-building, production chains, and tables of supply and demand. It lures you in with the promise of glory, discovery, and a world-spanning empire, and then makes you a bookkeeper – it’s fantastic.

Cities sprawl out quite far in Ara: History Untold. / Oxide Games / Microsoft

Ara’s world is visually stunning, full of little animations you can spectate from up close, and – in contrast to genre wisdom – not hex-based. Its world is divided into regions with natural borders formed by rivers, coasts, or mountains. Each region provides a base yield of food, wood, gold, and materials – depending on its terrain – and is in turn divided into zones where you may find special resources like rice, corn, horses, iron, and so on.

Improvements – everything from humble Farms to mighty Citadels and SAM Defense Batteries – are constructed in these zones and provide passive bonuses, some sort of production, or a mix. A Farm constructed on an empty zone provides food, of course, while a Farm built on corn can either yield the Grain resource or regular food – you can freely switch around. Food goes into a global stockpile and is used for city growth or maintaining armies, while Grain is a resource that can be refined into goods. A Granary, for example, can use it to make Grain Store, which can be activated in a city to generate extra food and a growth bonus. You could also use it in a Brewery to make Malt and then Beer, which can supply a city with food and happiness at the cost of some knowledge.

Things like knowledge and happiness are quality-of-life stats. Keeping these high in your cities will yield powerful bonuses to their production, growth, income, and so forth – and consistently earn you Prestige. Prestige is how you win a game of Ara: History Untold and you can obtain it essentially through everything you do: Constructing buildings, spreading your religion, having a strong standing army, winning wars, building Triumphs (wonders), etc. This versatile system allows every civilization in the game to shine, no matter its specialties, and enables your own playstyle to remain flexible even inside a single match.

Every aspect of the game provides you with Prestige gains. / Oxide Games / Microsoft

Using production chains – the developers at Oxide Games call it “crafting system” – is the key to victory and it’s also the game’s standout feature in terms of fun and engagement. There’s no one way to produce anything. You can build a Bakery and produce Bread even if you don’t have any Grain, but in order to reach the same production speed as with a steady supply of Grain, you’ll have to invest food from your stockpile into the building, which is a less efficient conversion.

Each good is associated with a recipe with around three slots that can be filled with an assortment of resources, all of which add production speed to the recipe. For Bread, we can invest Grain or food in the first slot, some money or even more food in the second slot, and some Salt or other materials in the third slot. With every slot filled out, the Bakery will produce Bread at a higher rate than without. But we can get even better results by supplying the Bakery itself with things like Metal Tools or Power, which improve its production speed regardless of the item it creates.

You can choose to create Grain Store with Grain, Rice Grain, or Wealth as primary ingredients and use Ceramic Pots or even more Wealth in the secondary slot. Note the Supplies delivered to the building at the top and the slotted-in Specialist. / Oxide Games / Microsoft

Even a humble Farm can be supplied with Plows, Power, Tractors, and Fertilizer to increase its yields. Housing districts can be equipped with Candles, Furniture, Computers, and so forth to provide passive bonuses to their cities. As your cities grow, they generate Specialists you can assign to improvements as well, making them even more efficient or adding more bonuses to them. The system is as broad as it is deep and you’ll organically veer towards chains that can be powered by the natural resources your empire provides, which creates a satisfying connection between that system and what you’re doing on the map. It also steers your foreign policy – if a neighbor has some juicy resource mines you need to build up a certain production chain, you may want to mobilize your troops.

Supplies and Specialists help improve production. / Oxide Games / Microsoft

Ara provides good overviews of your resource flow, allowing you to keep track of supply and demand, and its nested tooltips as well as in-game encyclopedia provide vital information in easily accessible ways, which helps the feeling of being overwhelmed by these mechanics. However, with how full the map gets towards the later stages of the game, functions like a search bar to find specific improvements on the territory of a city or notifications when new resources have been discovered could further alleviate any issues in that regard.

Space is one of the more limiting factors for your economy. You’re incentivized to use synergy between different building types to make each region as efficient as possible, and you’ll probably want to approach entire cities with a similar attitude, specializing them in certain pillars of the economy. Though it’s usually a no-brainer to build wonders in games like these, the fact that they fill an entire region by themselves in Ara makes constructing one a more meaningful decision.

Your government type decides how many cities your empire can have at any time. Such hard city caps are a mechanic I don’t really enjoy, but it’s a necessary evil in Ara, given how complex the production chain system gets – even without the presence of a real logistics system (you don’t need to build roads to transport resources; they’re automatically available where you need them). Cities can grow quite large over time, so you’ll want to place them further apart than you’d do in Civilization – this helps maximize the building space you’ll have at your disposal in the late game and will make your empire feel suitably big. But you can’t have that world-spanning empire on which the sun never sets.

Governments provide different policy options and city caps. / Oxide Games / Microsoft

There are so many smaller systems in Ara that we can’t go over each of them in detail – we have religions you can found, customize, and spread, we have Paragons you can assign to become government officials, lead armies, or create Masterpieces, we have the government types, a casus belli system, and so on. Each of these adds a little bit of flavor, a little bit of complexity and depth, and really helps round the experience out, but by themselves they’re all fairly standard for the turn-based strategy and grand strategy genres.

Naturally, diplomacy and warfare are part of the game as well, but with how I've been playing Ara – very much focused on my domestic affairs thanks to the gripping economy system – they’ve been something of an afterthought. Your military is deeply connected to your economy in this game, because you’ll need to produce certain types of goods and resources to even build most of the available roster. Another interesting thing is that units don’t get fielded directly on the map after being built. Instead, they get thrown into your pool of Reserves, from where you can deploy them at any later point, giving you power over when and how to mobilize your forces.

You need a solid economy to support complex unit types like Modern Armor. / Oxide Games / Microsoft

I’ve seen the AI in this game be really ruthless in exploiting a neighbor with less firepower than them, but I’ve also seen them declare some wars that were essentially suicide – the eternal struggle to get threateningly competent strategy game AI will not end with this game.

Optional battle screens allow you to immerse yourself in the exploits of your armies. / Oxide Games / Microsoft

A match of Ara is divided into three Acts, which end when a certain number of civilizations has entered specific technological eras. At the end of each Act, the bottom-ranked nations (in terms of Prestige) get kicked from the game, their cities falling into ruin and their units becoming wild barbarians. 

I don’t know how to feel about this system. It creates some space throughout the match, giving enclosed cities room to expand, but hardly opens the way to found new cities because you’ll be at your limit by that point anyway – a point that also makes aggressive playstyles feel somewhat suboptimal. At the same time, some of your closest allies and trade partners suddenly vanish, making you question why you’ve invested time and resources into fostering those relationships.

Ara does not feature a mini-map. To get a good overview, simply zoom all the way out. / Oxide Games / Microsoft

Naval gameplay is pretty lacking overall. There are precious few resources to be found among the waves and even in the late game, where you have sci-fi tech like giant mechas, nothing can be done with water regions aside from placing Fishing Boats on them, which is uninspiring. The same word applies to the civilization design in general – they all feel a little samey without any unique units, buildings, or aesthetics, even though their leaders’ unique traits do enable different playstyles.

Ara’s world is beautiful and detailed, bringing that hustle and bustle of city-builders into play, but more could have been done with the terrain. Aside from impassable mountains, everything is flat – there is no verticality, there are no hills, no cliffs. Ironically, the map sometimes feels more like a game board than that of other genre entries due to this.

Whether zoomed in or out, Ara is quite a looker and full of visual details. / Oxide Games / Microsoft

My final pet peeve is how fast the pace of technology is. Armies, for example, often feel outdated before you can field them – but I’m one of the masochists who love playing at Marathon speed in Civilization, so that might just be a problem for me.

Oxide did a great job with optimization. Despite all the eye candy, Ara runs as smooth as butter for me, even in the late game – given that Millennia, which is not even comparable visually, ran terribly in that phase at launch, that’s a massive feat.

Events invite you to make domestic and foreign policy decisions. / Oxide Games / Microsoft

Ara: History Untold feels really fresh, immersive, and innovative with its deep city-builder influences being the standout feature. It doesn’t nail the landing in all aspects, but provides the most exciting foundation for further expansion we’ve had in this genre for a long time.

Score: 8/10

Version tested: PC (Steam)