- Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
- Release Date: Sep 24, 2024
- Summary:
- Developer: Oxide Games
- Genre(s): General, Strategy, Turn-Based, 4X
- Cheats: On GameFAQs
- More Details and Credits »
Trailer
Play Sound
Please enter your birth date to watch this video:
You are not allowed to view this material at this time.
Score distribution:
-
Positive: 34 out of 53
-
Mixed: 19 out of 53
-
Negative: 0 out of 53
-
Sep 23, 2024By the time I reached the end of my journey and my nation stood above all the rest, I was left with one of the most satisfying gaming victories I’ve ever experienced. While Ara: History Untold asks a lot of players, it rewards those willing to put in the hours with a deeply rich gameplay experience that makes them feel like every choice they made shaped their nation and helped their people achieve greatness. From large-scale design innovations to the smallest details, the game delivers an almost flawless experience.
-
Oct 23, 2024If you’re expecting Ara: History Untold to be a new Civilization competitor, I think you’re looking at it all wrong. There’s aspects, sure, but this leans a lot more into economy, production, and politics. This feels like a game that’s made with passion, so I have every faith this will get better with time. Right now it’s still a bit clumsy in places, but if you take the time to learn it I believe you’ll find that this is a very fun title that stands on its own.
-
Sep 23, 2024Ara: History Untold boldly launches into the 4X landscape, bringing with it some intriguing innovations. Although the game introduces the prestige system and non-hex maps, it remains faithful to the basic structure of many other congeners. In this sense, the production by Oxide Games is more of a refined restyling than a Copernican revolution. Its new mechanics undoubtedly offer fresh ideas and compelling challenges and the attention to the smallest details further elevates the value of Ara. However, the complexity in resource management and a war component that does not hold up to comparison with the rest of the experience are less brilliant aspects of the package. In any case, we are faced with a valuable production, capable of intriguing fans of the reference genre.
-
Sep 24, 2024There’s a lot to like about Ara: History Untold, even with the rough edges that appear every so often. Barring some performance issues, I’d say anyone even a little curious about the genre should give the game a shot and try it for themselves (especially if you have Xbox Game Pass). As for those of you with hundreds of hours in 4X games? Well, Civilization VII is still months away and Ara is a worthwhile competitor in the space and so I highly recommend playing at least a few games during this wait. Who knows, maybe you’ll find yourself with a new favourite in the genre…
-
Sep 23, 2024Ara: History Untold tweaks the Civilization formula, but doesn’t change it all that much. While it’s a well polished experience, I’m not sure it does enough to push the genre forward, settling instead to do what it does well. That said, good strategy games can be hard to find, and Ara is a good one in a crowded field.
-
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.
-
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.
