Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition

I cannot recommend this game as it is asking full price for an incomplete product. The game has a few good ideas and potential but with a host of issues, uncertain future; it warrants caution before purchasing. That being said, if it can be bought for half price or under, and you’re a fan of the 4x genre, it could entertain you for a decent number of hours and hopefully provide enough value for your money. (details below if curious) Pros: -Production chains! (To be fair Millenia did this before them but it’s still a great mechanic) Being able to utilize the map beyond just high yield tiles is super fun and a great blend of crafting gameplay into the 4x genre. Building chains to then create items to empower your civ is a very deep and interesting system for the player to strategically utilize. How this was implemented is a bit of a con for this game but the overall idea is a huge positive and win. -City Quality. I really liked their mechanic on improving and receiving bonuses based on the quality of a city. This helps further deepen the Tall playstyle or creating a hyper specialized city. You could argue that they didn’t develop this enough and it has issues but the overall idea was solid. -Military. This could a be a hot take but I enjoyed how they implemented Military in this game. They utilized formations unlocking over time and to me this felt like a good compromise between one unit per tile and doom stacking. It also had a little bit of rock/paper/scissor with formations/unit type. Granted, how it actually works could use improvement and you could argue it’s a bit boring in auto resolving but I liked the overall idea of it. -Art/Map. The game has a good aesthetic and I liked the parceling of each region into 3-5 smaller pieces. This seemed like a good compromise of single tiles and/or the big regions that other games have been trying. Cons: -Lack of Polish/Playtesting. This is the biggest one as I could list hundreds of confusing questions I had while playing. There are so many times when you’re playing and you’re just confused and asking why the devs did or did not do something or how was this not caught during a single playtest? This is also ignoring bugs (there are a lot) and just focusing on awkward design decisions. An easy example is how they have a lot of focus on building but then strange issues within that core system: Some buildings upgrade smoothly throughout the game but some do not at all and have zero synergy? (why aren’t all building paths as smooth as workshops?) Why do some buildings have great synergies/throughput and some are standalone or completely terrible? There is no easy to way to replace a building. You have to demolish, wait a turn, then remember to go back and rebuild? I could go on and on and this is just one example in one system. The whole game feels unfinished and untested and that feels super frustrating as a consumer expecting a complete game. -Lack of playstyle options. They implemented food/production with a splash of culture/science/religion but there is no wealth or different/specialized playstyles. This is a big head scratcher as it’s in the 4x genre but they didn’t implement the major 4x pillars of playstyles? Or hybrid or anything? Where is the player choice or replayability? -Ai/Diplomacy/Trade. The Ai has very simplistic scripting where they forward settle, act erratic and just aggro/annoy the human player. This is not a challenge or strategically interesting, it’s just irritating. Then if they piggyback other mechanics like trade/diplo on top of an incompetent Ai, you lose a lot of gameplay and further frustrate the player. It’s awkward that we have such advanced Ai in real life but the Ai in this game is incredibly predictable and stupid. -Quality of Life improvements. They’re still working on major overhauls on this which is sad considering you would think this would have been the first thing to finish or patch. The biggest example of this is that you make 100+ items in this game but the organization and implementation of this is rough. You have to micro EACH building’s production for your entire civ and also adjust this constantly as the game progresses… oof. (There is some fun here in strategically producing but a lot of it can be quite tedious.) A game all about building and they didn’t think how the player would want to easily use or access this system? I was hoping this game was going to be good and help fill the hole that Civ 7 left in the genre but sadly it’s an incomplete mess. It feels like they got a little lost in the weeds and didn’t have a clear holistic goal for the final vision. It’s a 4x with production chains which is cool but then they didn’t think about how that system interacts with the rest of the game or how to streamline or refine that system. As a result, the core gameplay loop is missing, sloppy and it leaves the player head scratching and wondering where the rest of the game is. It did have some good gems for future devs to expand and build upon but to call this a complete product is a massive stretch.

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.)

Game is very underrated. Picked this one up alongside Civ7 and played both side by side for a couple hours for a first impressions. Needless to say I personally think this game blows Civ 7 out of the water for a first impressions review. The map in this game is absolutely gorgeous with excellent detailing, I really have to commend the Devs for the map alone. Game play wise IMO this game focus's more on Economics rather than conquest, which I see as a good thing, and makes the game a lot more engaging and invested. The systems already in place give you all the information you need, and I like it. Also - there is a 9999 turn option now included so endless play is real. I do note the last update included some QOL improvements. If Devs keep working on this game its a thumbs up from me. If you are disappointed with Civ 7 give this one a go, I am sure you wont regret it.

With the release of 2.0 I feel I can finally recommend this game. Ara comes with it's own take on the 4x "civ like" style of game, where the focus is on the production of the ever more complex resources that your civilisation needs. With the original 1.0 release the game suffered from a very bad case of micromanagement requirements, but that has been considerably improved for the 2.0 release. The AI is also doing much better now and will be a good challenge on the appropriate difficulty level. Combat is fairly simple in the game, more similar to something like EU4 than Civ, but honestly that works for me as the micro focus shifts to managing the economy and crafting of the various production chains. This game offers one of the most amazing descriptions of what the industrial age must've been like on a historic scale, as you find yourself suddenly being able to produce incredible goods that have huge impact on your people or your armies, that in turn need huge quantities of lesser goods that can only be produced in the needed quantities by standing up dozens of factories and rushing to acquire sources of coal to power everything and seeing the health of your cities plummet all the while. I hope to see more development on Ara, it does it's own thing and it's pretty good at it!

They did a great job with the last update but the fight are simply horrible, so much that I decided to uninstall the game. You can throw in 12 units against 2 or 3 enemy units and the fight takes an eternity to end, so much that the IA will simply send a unit in the fight from time to time and will win. Taking a city in these conditions is almost impossible, the city will simply produce units all fight long and even if you had the biggest, badest army you will simply lose. And because the number of units is limited, you cannot add any more. It is the worst system of fight I saw in a strategy game, worst of all, and I play since the first CIV. I decided that it is time to uninstall the game, the new fight system is simply bull.... and it makes the game almost unplayable and not fun at all.

As a regular and recurring player of almost any and all x4 games and despite giving this one repeated chances, I can confidently say new console and iPad generation knows nothing about making games... It feels like everything but a kitchen sink was put into a blender than the output was masterfully decorated. Graphics and effects are fantastic translation into a coherent game is not... I love micro managing game assets for min-max, but this feels like a training attempt to grow the next generation of tedious repetitive dead en office workers who has no idea they can ask why... Great disappointment on my end. As an additional note, It has come to my attention of leader nation choices are a bit biased. I am pretty sure it was decided upon a marketing "guru" based on potential revenue or some racial bias... Where are the Ottomans?

I have decided to update this review after the new update which is really promising! It's just still not quite there for me yet. For me though I sadly still can't recommend the game in its current state. The new update is really good and has made things generally better. The new map generation feels a lot better and is visibly noticeable, there are more resources generally, better spread and the map itself feels more interesting. For me the biggest issue still remains, the crafting system. It's way more micro than I would like in a 4x game, for me I think it could be improved if crafting quotas were just one menu, one list of goods/quotas. Having to go into every building to setup a new quota is a pain. I am also not sure if it's intentional by design but all of my cities tend have most stats (but not all) 40 or below in the early game. If that is intended that's fine but I feel like it needs to be explained if that is the case, and if it's not, then I feel a tutorial or something should be added to the game to explain how I should not be in this situation. Devs have done a great job with reworking leaders and adding factional units which is amazing to see, music is good and so far I like the new influence mechanic added to the game. I will say that it's entirely possible I am playing the game in a very non optimal way (not intentionally so) and that could be the source of frustration, but I am comfortable with other 4x games. If that was the case then I feel the game would benefit from a tutorial or a during play tutorial to be like "Hey, this is how to get started in this particular game, this is our intention with this mechanic" as I am not sure if the mechanics are unclear to me and I am simply just not understanding it, or if it's simply not designed in an effective way. I do think this game has improved and I think for anyone who doesn't mind the crafting mechanic it is a good game, for me, I will still be sitting on the fence until the crafting system is changed, it's just not enjoyable in its current form in my opinion.

Whatever updates that have been done recently have made this game unbalanced and unplayable. The accumulation of gold early on is now impossible to maintain and also growth. The attack strategies are impossible even on easy. This game has become a waste of time.