Ara History Untold review – Microsoft’s grand strategy game is a hit

The one-more-turn compulsion is alive and well. Ara: History Untold is the latest in a smattering of games offering alternatives to Sid Meier’s classic formula, like Humankind or Old World. In concept, Ara does not reinvent the wheel. I haven’t checked in with Civilization since its fifth entry, but I immediately felt at home with the game’s basics. However, the multitude of small and significant differences create something in serious conversation with other grand strategy games. Ara: History Untold is not an outright improvement, neither is it a mere homage. It is worth engaging with on its own terms.

Like Civilization, Ara sees you take control of an empire at the beginning of its history: first controlling one small village on an unexplored map until it becomes a vast and technologically advanced empire. Rather than offering multiple paths to victory, a la Civ, various strategies all offer Prestige (like victory points in a eurogame). Every nation competes on a worldwide leaderboard, with the highest score winning the epoch. At the end of each act, i.e. major epochs of history, the bottom civilizations will drop out, not memorable enough to survive.

While this system gives more flexibility – you can spec hard into military production if war breaks out and then pop right back to building libraries once it’s over – you’ll still have to tune your overall strategy. Each civilization’s leaders offer a variety of perks. Military leaders like Itzcoatl or Genghis Khan will grant you buffs for engaging in combat or give your forces extra strength when they are outside your territory. Other leaders like Eva Perón focus on cultural improvement, while still others, like Sejong the Great or Nicolaus Copernicus, focus on knowledge and innovation. Ara has over 40 leaders which alter how you approach the game, and how eager you are to get in a fight.

Fighting can be costlier because of how Ara’s cities work. Each city is made up of various tiles. The higher the population, the more tiles your city can expand to. Each tile offers slots for improvements, like farms, hunting camps, workshops, and factories. When a city is captured it can be razed or assimilated. If it is razed, all its improvements turn to ash. But even if your opponent does not raze a city, they can pillage the improvements outside of its center. A destructive war can push your civ out of the competition. Furthermore, cities can build infrastructural improvements or military units, but not both at once. For every step you take into military domination, you take a step out of economic or cultural power.

Turns are taken simultaneously, meaning you’ll have to predict your opponents’ every move. Once your forces get locked into a battle, they can’t retreat, though you can always bring in reinforcements. So, you’ll want to be careful about what battles you get into and when. A lot of factors play into each combat encounter, i.e. terrain type, variety of military units, etc. However, Civilization does a better job of surfacing those strategic decisions. If you want to understand the game’s military systems, you’ll need to dig through submenus to find buffs and debuffs and work to perfect your economic engine.

Speaking of which, another major addition to the grand strategy game formula is crafting. Like Civ, you can claim land with resources like salt, livestock, or silk. You can then use these resources to craft materials. You’ll construct chariots from wheels and horses, grow flowers to build hanging gardens, and craft gunpowder to construct cannons. You can also assign specific goods to your cities and individual production sites to boost your stats. This gives the game’s strategy a city-building flavor. You’ll need to ensure you can build the right materials to train the right units or construct the best Triumphs (the game’s interpretation of Civ’s wonders). The result of this is a mind-boggling level of micromanagement. It is overwhelming and even sometimes boring to map out each of your cities’ economic power. However, if you get in the right mindset, crafting gives the strategy game a surprising edge. Narrow differences in prestige points can win games. So efficiencies in production pipelines and speccing into the right items can earn you victory just as much as a decisive battle or a potent religion.

Visually, Ara does away with hexes and squares. Each space on the map has a looser, more ‘natural’ looking border. It also goes for a more direct ‘representational style’ than Civilization. Zooming in on the map will show little citizens moving around, farming, fishing, and working. It is gratifying to see your little cities develop into hubs and magnificent metropolises. It’s like peaking in on an actual little world. However, in play you mostly engage with Ara’s UI, which is populated by bland, board-game-like icons and slick-looking but overwhelming menus and submenus. It’s difficult to get a sense of your civ’s economy at a glance. You’ll spend a lot of time deciding what you actually need to craft. Still, the UI is good at keeping things snappy. A notification bar on the right side of the screen updates you with every major event on your turn. At its best, the UI doesn’t get in the way of how compulsive Ara is. I could do with more stopping places – it’s frighteningly easy to lose track of time -but it is to the game’s credit that it is so enveloping.

Part of the appeal of these historical ‘simulators’ is their ability to remix and recontextualize major characters of history. It is funny to nuke a country as Ghandi or cathartic to play as a colonized country besting its invaders. However, the mix-and-match quality of Civilization, as well as the emphasis on exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination result in a multitude of absurdities.

Even at first blush, Ara is rife with these kinds of contradictions. Major leaders include some of the usual suspects: Charlemagne, Queen Elizabeth the 1st, and other major military leaders and monarchs. However, Ara: History Untold also includes many marginal figures who left a definitive historical legacy but had far less power, such as the poet Sappho, Cherokee Nation principal chief Wilma Mankiller, and Abbess Hildegard von Bingen. These are not the kinds of people who were deciding the fates of nations. In the case of Wilma Mankiller, she was fighting for her nation’s right to be recognized at all, even for it to have control of its own finances. I am glad the game will make figures like this more recognizable, but there is such an absurdity to their presence here. Even with Ara’s strategic flexibility, it undergirds a ‘might makes right’ logic in every one of its systems. It is still a game about building empires. The inclusion of some marginal and indigenous heroes does not change that.

All told, I do not expect a game published by Microsoft to have the satirical bite of Syphilisation or the anti-colonial punch of Spirit Island. For what it is, Ara: History Untold is well done. It’s engaging moment-to-moment with a strong overall arc. It makes meaningful contributions to a well-worn genre at every turn, even if those contributions are not all successes. If you’ve sunk countless hours into the likes of Civilization, Ara will legitimately challenge your preconceptions and instincts. Nevertheless, the marginal histories Ara engages with, but does not embrace, deserve a better steward.