Ara: History Untold is an addictive and messy strategy game

I'm a big fan of the template set out by Sid Meier's Civilization series. In essence, macro-managing an entire civilization from the cradle to the far future. At its best, it allows for big creative ideas to exist with small, intimate moments that connect us to the human experience. Both reductive and all-encompassing, it's a series that thrives on contradictions.

Ara: History Untold takes that template to explore humanity from an alternative history. It bravely attempts to mess with elements we've taken for granted for decades. In some ways, it's a rousing success in starting a conversation about what a 4X strategy came can still do. In others, it's a frustrating and messy experience that trips over itself as it tries to outsmart its influences.

The first thing to remember is that Ara: History Untold is not Civilization. That might seem obvious from the outset, but it's something I had to remind myself multiple times over. Ara looks, plays, and often sounds like Civilization, and it's entirely understandable why. It's such a loving imitation that even the most blatant lifts come across as deeply devoted to the craft rather than crass.

But Ara is a far more modest game, and the first one from developer Oxide Games. Where Civilization has taken years to perfect its formula, leading to one of the most fluid and comprehensively engaging game loops in existence, Ara still searches for its own shape. For now, most of its wins are those that stick closest to Meier's magnum opus. At its messiest, Ara mistakes confusion for complexity, and stacks mechanisms upon one another until it feels like homework.

This, more than any other aspect of Ara, comes down to the player themselves. As an AuDHD gamer, I found the myriad of menus and options overwhelming. Not necessarily because of how deep the mechanics are, but because of their user interface. In any given round, you have to micromanage every city, farm, granary, blacksmith, you name it. You have to decide on upgrades, tools, and materials for the immediate future, but also far into the game. For example, choosing to skip a certain technological advance might close off a material for good. In an early game, I skipped out on religion almost entirely, and found that it blocked my access to glass about a hundred turns later.

While this does lead to a far more tactical experience, it often gets in the way of simply enjoying the majesty that Ara offers. There's little middle ground between the micro and the macro, and it's an acquired taste how much you enjoy either one.

Granted, it's a thrill when your best laid plans bear fruit. An early alliance I fostered with China paid dividends hundreds of years later, when I could share in cultural spoils that ensured that Belgium's prestige fell dramatically.

That prestige is what Ara uses to calculate victory points. At the end of every era, the cultures with the least amount of prestige find themselves forgotten to history. So, be it through conquest, art, or commerce, every round becomes not just a race to see who can foster the most prestige – but who can cultivate it throughout time.

It's one of my favorite aspects of Ara, one that sometimes gets buried in the minutiae of the actual gameplay.

Other aspects are bummers, too. On a technical level, my aging rig struggles with the game. Especially as it nears the endgame, where the fog of war is practically gone. Even on lower graphical settings, I found Ara to be a surprisingly heavy game for a strategy sim. Especially as Frostpunk 2, another title under review, runs beautifully even on higher settings.

Then there are iffy elements, like how the road building mechanics seem to work only sometimes. Often, the game will ask for me to build a road between cities, only to complain that it can't find a route there – despite that my scouts have made the journey already! The AI is all over the place, sometimes starting a war only to surrender within the next turn, before I've even had time to react. The UI, already cumbersome, doesn't give enough information about key events, and it becomes particularly annoying to scan through your cities every turn for new chores.

These are small, but important things that Ara just doesn't nail. At least not yet. But it's their first game of this type, and on that front, it does so much right that I'm more than willing to overlook missteps. It aims to compete with one of the most prestigious games in the business, and to complain that it "isn't Civilization" already shows how impressive Ara is even in its current form.

The most important things that matter remain true: I spent hours lost in Ara's spell. It captures the "one more turn" addiction beautifully. It has elegance to many mechanics, and the way it rethinks old colonialist troops is nothing short of masterful.

Ara: History Untold is a bold and terrific first game from an interesting studio. I think their sequel will be better. For now, this is a solid title to tide you over until Civilization 7 launches next year. Next time, I wouldn't be surprised if things didn't turn out the opposite, as Ara has room to grow into something even more impressive.

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this product from https://www.game.press