Ara: History Untold

Ara is not a normal civ. It's more like a micro-managed city builder where instead of controlling a city, remember the Caesar series, we manage an empire. Here the important thing is not wars or religion, which have a certain importance, but rather that the game is won by prestige achieved by the well-being of citizens by supplying their pyramid of needs. It is true that war and religion influence but they play a secondary role. It is a 4X, but victory is better achieved by the pen than by the sword. I repeat, it is not a civ. His style is a mix of Humankind with Anno management. Positive point, anyone who likes these games of numbers and opening and closing tabs will be in their element. Negative point, depending on how you look at it, the very steep learning curve. I like difficult games so I give it a nine.

I went into this game with very little experience in these styles of games. Closest being a small amount of Age of empires. The game does a lot of things I thought were good. But starting off with what I didn't like so this finishes on a positive. I found the games tutorial was a poorly explained barrage of text dumps. Leading me to click things without knowing why. I have played a lot of video games, so I was figuring things out after so long on my own. But I can see this putting people off. Age of Empires campaign takes a narrative story approach for it's tutorial, slowly introducing things to the player. Ara would benefit from something like this. My next issue was the UI. So many things just annoyed me with it. Like when you apply buffs to your resource generators,all the icons are the same plus icon (+), but each selection of items inside the menu is different. Why not have different icons for each one? Even if it's just different colours corresponding to different sets of items. Another weird thing is when your choose stuff, you sometimes have to close a menu to click the next menu, despite it being a side menu. Can it not just replace the menu itself? That just feels a bit obvious to me. Another issue is performance. There is no DLSS or FSR so you can't use these to help. It's a turn based game so it's not gonna impact your skill. It's just annoying in the later game when its running terribly. Please add FSR or something to take some strain off the GPU? It's open source so it doesn't cost any money to add this. Some resource supplies felt a bit unusual or confusing. Like when you trade, why do they not ask you for anything in return? It's not trading, it's just a free stream of gifts. Also I think manufacturing should require some resources. Rather then a lot of the time it just speeding it up. Even if it's just gold to simulate buying the resources you don't have. My last issue is auto repeat idle troops. So you don't have to keep waiting and fortifying. Let me automatically wait for multiple turns in a row please? I enjoyed the battling. I found that was pretty cool. It's awesome how each battle and war is even named. Also certain things like creating your own religion. The game also has so many neat ideas that if they were further fleshed out could really be amazing. I was in a war with another country. Then at one point they proposed we put our differences aside and work together, because another country was clearly getting to ambitious. However this doesn't check if you are at wa, so you remain in one despite accepting the offer?? This would be great if it ended the war and boosted your respect with them. You will come across so many decisions that I think should be more impactful. Cos 90% of the time you're better off just accepting due to the lack of negative effects. Maybe change this so there are bigger stakes. The animations in this game are really cool. It makes the world feel so much more alive. The game is highly addictive. With so many things to constantly interact with, you constantly want to work towards stuff. Even if you haven't played many strategy games, I recommend giving Ara a go. If you stick through the tutorial and continue to work things out then you will be rewarded with game you can sink hours into. You won't even realize where the time went.

Хорошая 4х стратегия. При этом ничего сверхуникального в ней нет. Но если вы любите циву и она вам надоела - пробуйте Ару.

4/10 because of the mid-to-end game mechanics. I wonder how this game got approved at Xbox. They didn't play it. Eventually, you reach the city cap in the early game. You cannot do much about it. There's no reason to conquer, to expand, to build, or to wage war anymore because you've reached the city cap already. Your "empire" then stalls around the early Middle Ages. From there, you'll skip all turns until the end of the game. Also, the AI nations change their attitude for no reason, but once you are strong and advanced, you simply sign trade and/or research agreements -- and they do not matter anymore. I thought that Humankind was a low point in 4X gameplay, but I'm afraid that this game does not understand what the 4X stands for. And, oh, micromanagement hell. It gets worse the further into the future you go.

I do appreciate the detailed supply chain and I liked the effort that has gone into making it play more like a wargame from the 80s. The game's core, a city simulator of production chains where outputs become the inputs for a greater range of products over time is interesting. It's not innovative and even though it's the central core of the game's design - it wasn't applied to all the improvements that you build. The purported living world is a satisfying string of visual animations but the 'world' is not dynamic or responsive to the actions taken by the player. Almost all of the gameplay except military conquest is passive micro-management. Trading between players isn't a barter system it's a 'free' production over time of items one player has in their inventory for another - this is the antithesis of the game's core design. Resources are unlimited and the endless bounty of the colonizer extraction approach isn't challenged at any point. Minor factions and AI players do trigger events that are based in actual historical events but lack 'personality' in that once you've experienced the small pool of events the game launched with you realize the summation of these in-game entities effects are popup events ... these popup events allow you the player to set the tone for the relationship. In a multiplayer games you don't have these and you can if you have voice over applications roleplay or negotiate things and that could provide satisfaction but unfortunately the in-game diplomatic actions are simplistic and unoriginal. As for aesthetic the music does eventually take on a solid presence in the game but visually aside from the 'living world' experience the games visuals seem almost archaic and to my view are mostly static considering the hype around the living world and other triumphs shown off. The map and the UI are quite busy with several components potentially disguising others - other units and their icons for example can be hidden behind your building or units icons. The details of my disappointment could include a longer list and in some places maybe a bullet point of potential gaffs and errors. Near launch they changed one small Quality of Life name from "Aesthetics" to Security - but this creates some odd bonuses in the game where they kind of make sense once you realize that the developers are still working on the game. In a very real sense they may still be working on the entire game. The publishers worked with the developers to plan out a year of continued funding. So they do plan to work on the game for at least a year after launch but this creates a premise for a different question. The question of when, or even if, the game will be finished and ready for launch. Honestly this game feels like a huge success for their marketing team. Because I was typing that up to joke about the game still being 'in the works' but it's not a joke, not really. It's not a finished project. It seems like it's got more unfinished elements than finished ones.