- Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
- Release Date: Sep 24, 2024
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
- Unscored
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Sep 27, 2024Ara: History Untold is a worthy representative of the strategy genre, offering innovative mechanics for those who particularly enjoy the building aspect of empire building games focused on diplomacy and warfare. Although many of its elements must be polished and refined to stand the test of time, the foundations are solid, and the future looks promising.
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Sep 24, 2024Ara: History Untold dares a lot, but many things still don't work out as planned. It still falls short of its role model, Civilization.
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Sep 26, 2024Despite the inclusion of innovations like Prestige, which offers a more sophisticated appraisal of your leadership, Ara: History Untold doesn’t outshine Civilization. Instead, it feels like a lateral deviation, where some components are restructured but others flirt with tedium by the third and final act.
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Oct 25, 2024Strategy games needed new ideas, and Ara has a few of them if you're patient and play.
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Sep 23, 2024Ara: History Untold doesn't really do anything new, but it takes good ideas from so many games and combines them in a meaningful way that fans of Civ, Millennia or Humankind will definitely have fun with. However, some of the many systems – such as diplomacy or combat – aren't really polished. The game certainly has the potential to patch itself up, but at release it's not enough.
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Sep 23, 2024Ara: History Untold is beautiful to look at, offers complexity, and nails its concept with flying colours, but it lacks the customisation options its competitors offer, and is technically substandard. It has great potential to be a truly brilliant addition to the genre if the developers can fix the major technical issues, balance problems, and can update the title properly, turning the game into something that also survives the test of time.
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Sep 23, 2024Ara: History Untold brings city-building to Civilization with strategic success.
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Sep 23, 2024A beautifully presented and accessible game in a sometimes obscure genre, Ara: History Untold is a pretty picture book rather than a deep tome.
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Sep 23, 2024Ara: History Untold is a decent foray into the historical 4X, with enough borrowed and slightly tweaked elements to make it worth a look for fans of the genre. Its original ideas become too much of a slog however, along with a scattering of UI issues and performance hiccups that need addressing.
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Sep 27, 2024I'm certain that many fans of Civilization will quickly abandon playing ARA: History Untold. No Civ demands such careful consideration of the smallest details and micro-dependencies from the player. You need to ask yourself: do you want to conquer lands or manage the production of cement and ploughs? If the latter sounds interesting, you're right where you need to be.
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Sep 24, 2024Ara: History Untold was supposed to be the game that, after nearly eight years, could make us forget Civilization VI. However, it seems that once again, we'll have to wait for the seventh installment to lose ourselves, one turn at a time. The title, developed by Oxide Games, looks very promising. It has a visually striking graphical style and some interesting flashes of brilliance. However, it’s a strategy game whose core focus is hard to grasp, and it falls victim to overwhelming micromanagement that permeates every turn. This has drawn attention away from areas that needed more care, such as diplomacy, technology, and those essential late-game variations.
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Edge MagazineOct 31, 2024Ara is at once too shallow and too deep, a 4X game where one of its crosses bears far more eight than the others. [Issue#404, p.118]
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Oct 15, 2024I had very high expectations for Ara: History Untold but they failed to materialize. The game has many very good qualities compared to other games with lots of years of experience in the genre, but at the end of the day it fails in one of the most important elements of 4X games and that is to give the player that 'one more turn' feeling that keeps you playing until the middle of the night. This is mainly due to unflexible and exhausting game systems and a very planned way of playing compared to the complete freedom and feeling of constant progress that you get from other games.
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Oct 7, 2024Ultimately, Ara: History Untold is a collection of good ideas that don’t harmonize well. The game feels unfinished, with many mechanics feeling half-baked or monotonous. The overwhelming micromanagement and lack of distinct playstyles reduce the desire to replay, as each session starts to feel like a repeat of the last, mired in the same frustrations. The game doesn’t do a good job of highlighting what’s important, despite having a comprehensive in-game encyclopedia and tooltip system. Important information gets lost in the clutter, and the lack of smooth gameplay flow makes it difficult to stay engaged. For players who enjoy deep micromanagement and have the patience for an unwieldy interface, Ara offers some enjoyment, especially in the early game, where glimpses of a rewarding strategy experience shine through.
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Oct 1, 2024While it does offer some strategy thrills, all of this really holds it back from being another genre kingpin. With DLC and future updates, it may have a chance to iron out its weaker aspects. But, outside a few unique twists, it feels like it is missing something to make it truly worth the price of admission.
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Sep 27, 2024I keep bringing up competitors like Civilization and Humankind not just for obvious comparisons or to be cruel, but because Ara: History Untold sought to position itself as big mix up for historical strategy. And I want that! I love this genre, but only having a few big games flying that banner has led to it becoming a bit stale, and more competitors and new ideas could shake things up. But unfortunately, Ara doesn’t do much to really drive things forward. Most of the new additions have been tried before and the crafting system, the one actually unique part, fails to add much more than extra busywork and spreadsheeting. It’s still totally functional as a historical 4X, easily alluring me back into the one-more-turn mindset, but it doesn’t succeed in bringing much that is really new to the table.
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Sep 26, 2024A good alternative to Civilization that could be even better with a little more optimization. Beautifully detailed world, interesting features and flexibility.
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Sep 26, 2024Ara delves deeply into a single mechanic. Warfare, diplomacy, religion, and research are stripped down to the bare essentials, leaving the majority of your time focused on balancing the production of a massive array of materials and their interconnected, complex production chains. While this is initially engaging, it quickly becomes tedious in the later stages, where balancing production feels more like managing a budget before an accounting deadline.
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Sep 24, 2024While Ara: History Untold is a visually captivating historical 4X with an interesting underlying economy, it gets bogged down well before the midway point, mainly because it doesn’t provide enough tools and UI support to manage all of the things it expects you to manage. Your choice of leader, religion, and government almost always simply add uninteresting passive modifiers, which means most playthroughs will feel roughly the same other than the layout of the map itself. I had a pretty decent time with my march through the ages, especially in the first of its three acts. But it did require me to eventually give up on trying to play optimally, passing turns without doing anything until I emerged victorious. A lot of these systems are exciting and clever in their design – they're just not that enjoyable to interact with past a certain point.
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Oct 21, 2024With a rival like Civilization to beat, Xbox exclusive Ara: History Untold surprises even the most veteran with deep, humanistic strategic management. [Recommended]
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Oct 1, 2024Ara is an interesting and enjoyable spin on the Civ concept but becomes unwieldy long before it's over. Figuring out how to build a thriving empire will be an enjoyable challenge to people looking for a certain kind of production chain game, but I don't see its malnourished AI and ballooning micromanagement keeping them around once they do.