Ara: History Untold Review

thesixthaxis.com:

There’s a real hustle and bustle to the historical 4X strategy genre right now, and Oxide Games’ Ara: History Untold is another strong contender for the crown that brings more fresh ideas and perspectives to a very familiar setting.

Ara: History Untold tries to put a distinctive spin on how historical events and the rise and fall of various civilisations are depicted in this genre, and one thing I particularly like is how this affects the victory conditions. Everything that you do is in the name of accruing Prestige, and points are handed out for everything, from completing technological research to winning wars, holding onto alliances, simply producing a lot of goods, or pushing for cultural advancement and looking after your people through your governance.

You’ll still progress through historical technological eras in turn, but there’s also an overarching three-act structure as soon as multiple nations reach certain eras – and if you want, you can skip certain research groups in order to skip ahead an era. Each act transition also brings with it a winnowing of the field of competitors, the lower nations being consigned to the history books, their cities turning into ruins in the process.

It helps add some stakes earlier in the game, giving you a hurry up if you see that you’re falling behind after the first hundred turns, and potentially pushing you to min-max down a particular path to earn Prestige. Find yourself lagging behind in the Iron Age, and you might start throwing some armies around in the Antiquities, picking on some other lower-placed nations to scrabble your way back up.

One of the biggest and best ways to get ahead, though, is simply to look after your people and their quality of life. Each city has an individual measure of its citizens’ contentment across five categories, ensuring that you have to keep your city fairly well balanced in terms of what it provides. You’ll have to keep pace with providing a well for your people to give them fresh water,