Ara: History Untold Reviews

Version 1.4 has reduced micromanagement, thus created a more pleasant game experience. the difficulty sliders make the game more flexible and enjoyable. The AI competitors are interesting.

It's an itch that Civ can't quite scratch for me, and I love it. For those who *don't* want to micromanage and min/max city output, you will not want to play after your 3rd settlement. For those that *do* like to micromanage and optimize settlements/cities/buildings, then you'll love this. In my mind, it's like Civ 6, move adjacency bonuses to regional bonuses/synergies with buildings/construction, and sprinkle in some (a lot) of (forgive my nomenclature) "tier-crafting". Think, "I need this far to gather spices, then I need another farm to get grain, build a bakery and use that grain to accelerate the output and then assign it as an amenity for whichever city needs it most". It's a great game, with some performance issues. I play on high/ultra and it can get choppy zooming out quickly and in, but it's a turn based game so it doesn't impact playability in my opinion. Try it out, it's good fun. My only two gripes are sometimes battles are a pain in the ass to initiate, and I prefer a much more realistic representation of historical characters. I was NOT a fan of Civ VI art style, but it grew on me. Same with Ara. Play for two hours and if you don't like it, refund it :)

I used to play Civ IV, V and VI, but have not yet tried Civ VII. While Civ VI was Really good and I got to know the game well. Still I have been searching for something different. I tried old world which is really fun, but it is also a smaller scale than many 4X games. But it seemed more war focused. I am really happy, though, that I bought Ara: History Untold. In many ways it is quite different from the Civilization series. For example the crafting of Items and then combining items to craft other things. War/Combat is somewhat different, but not bad. War is not the prime focus of the game. The GUI is nicely done, The maps are nice. One can zoom down to ground level and watch the people go about their business amid the flora and fauna and buildings, which is a nice touch, and pleasing to the eye. its a work in progress but unlike some games the developers Communicate often and well with patches and major releases still coming. I enjoy playing it and I think you will too.

I have 40 playing hours in the game and about the same amount of time trying to load the #*#* game. I've tried everything posted, the only way I could reload a game was to start a new game and on the first turn load my saved game. But now 300 turns in even that will not work.

I was a longtime intensive player of the Civ series. I think this game beats them all!!!!! If you think Civ 7 does not cut it, give Ara a try.

I really like this game over civ 7. Many mechanics of this game are fun, but If the Devs will just stick with it and add more content it could be one of the best in my opinion. Really needs those special nation only units and more types of units!! We will see.

This game had been sitting on my wishlist for ages due to the mixed reviews. When it finally went on sale, I decided to give it a shot—and now I regret not buying it sooner. It’s exactly what I hoped Civ 7 would be. An amazing game that, in my opinion, really doesn’t deserve the negative reviews.

Imposible playing in lower non-gaming PC configurations. They are counting many attempts of starting game as playing and they refused refunding,

Let me just first say, I am not trying to offend anyone. I just think this game is not worth players' time anymore. I bought this game because the game designers that helped create Sid Meier's Civilization V supposedly helped create this game. When I actually did play Ara, there were many mechanics that I thought were genuinely novel and brought new dynamics to the 4x game genre. Cities grow and new districts with really in-depth graphic detail makes it look like your cities come to life. Wonders, which are called "Triumphs," are also highly detailed and can be destroyed in war. It is stuff like this that made me wish I could like the game, but there are mechanics that I just can't get over. In ARA you can't just build something like a cathedral willy nilly, you need to craft the specific materials first. You need to create mines for the stone, you need workshops to refine the stone. You also need to mine rock to create glass, you need workshops to refine the glass, then you need craft shops to take many shards of glass to craft into a stained glass window. Don't even ask me how to make candles for the cathedral. Building improvements and buildings in ARA quickly becomes tedious. Someone on the game design team took what was in D&D and made it 100 times more complicated. At the end of the day you don't feel like you are a ruler in Ara, you feel like you are a one-man civilization where nothing gets made unless you micromanage everything. In Ara, you can't just feed your cities, give them luxuries, and call it a day. In ARA there are many bars that tell you the productivity of your city and its health. Are your cities getting enough food? Are your cities happy? Are your cities healthy? And what a city is supposed to provide for your civilization (e.g. science, commerce) only gets worse when your city gets bigger. This wouldn't be as big of a problem, except I already explained that building improvements to make your city stats better is tedious and takes a long time, at which point you are stuck trying to keep the declining city stats of your nation up for as long as you can by giving them temporary luxuries. The problems of trying to keep your cities healthy and trying to keep the economy of your cities okay does not get better as you found more cities: it gets much worse. I found myself dreading conquering foreign cities of civilizations that declared war on me, because one more city would tank the stats of my civilization. The more cities you have, the more micromanaging that you have to do. And when something goes wrong with your economy (you run out of a material or something), trying to fix it feels like trying to put a four-funnel ocean liner in reverse after it was going full steam ahead. There are just some other small details that irks me the wrong way. One of those details is the choice of "leaders" in Ara; I'm sorry Copernicus was not a Polish king, but a Renaissance polymath, and Harriet Tubman was an abolitionist not a U.S. president. It seems that Ara tried so hard to break out of the mold of using the same, profoundly important leaders used in the past by other video games, that it broke the mold entirely and lost the definition of "leader." Another thing that was weird was the game's feeble but insistent use of C.E. and B.C.E., which I guess stands for "Common Era" and "Before Common Era?" What does that mean? Am I supposed to believe that the use of fire was not common until after Christ was born? I say that the use of C.E. and B.C.E. is feeble in this game because on some of the history entries of great persons you can earn in the game, they still use A.D. and B.C., which, quite frankly, makes more sense. I really wanted to like this game. I really wanted to see this game succeed. I thought there were some mechanics that were cool, and that I hope to see in new 4x games in the future. But this game missed the mark in some really important parts. Playing Ara, for me, became such a drag, and I began dreading giving this game another chance. Let me just reiterate, I am not trying to offend anyone. I just think this game is not worth players' time anymore. (Review was updated to correct grammatical errors; otherwise, the review remains unchanged.)

Very interesting 4X, clearly inspired by Civilization and Anno. Amazing graphics and promising mechanics, but poor execution. The Anno part on this game is clearly poorly designed, and leans heavily into micromanagement and byzantine systems. If your civilization has one incoming source of iron, why is it forced to dump all of it into either the production of metal tools, troops, or other consumer products? The game tries to be clever by forcing the player to micromanage a rapidly growing list of amenities, but lacks the proper execution of a minimally intelligent supply and demand system. In the end, the player is not taking interesting decisions, but instead managing numbers in the game's spread sheets to get some obscure bonuses. On the Civ side of the game, nothing too innovative compared to the Civilization games. Most of the systems are at best on par with Civ, and some others (such as combat) are mediocre. I want to like this game, but right now I cannot recommend it. The soul is there, the mechanics also; the devs just have to figure out a direction to make the game pleasing and interesting to play. Hope to come back to it in the future and see some good work done.