Ara: History Untold review

Our VerdictA beautifully presented and accessible game in a sometimes obscure genre, Ara: History Untold is a pretty picture book rather than a deep tome.

Our Verdict

A beautifully presented and accessible game in a sometimes obscure genre, Ara: History Untold is a pretty picture book rather than a deep tome.

PC Gamer’s got your backOur experienced team dedicates many hours to every review, to really get to the heart of what matters most to you.Find out more about how we evaluate games and hardware.

Need to knowWhat is it?History-spanning 4X grand strategy game or: Phil Spencer’s CivilizationExpect to pay£50/$60 (included in Game Pass)Release dateSeptember 24, 2024DeveloperOxide GamesPublisherXbox Game StudiosReviewed onIntel i7 13700HX, RTX 4080 (mobile), 32GB RAMSteam DeckUnknownLinkOfficial siteCheck Amazon

Need to know

What is it?History-spanning 4X grand strategy game or: Phil Spencer’s CivilizationExpect to pay£50/$60 (included in Game Pass)Release dateSeptember 24, 2024DeveloperOxide GamesPublisherXbox Game StudiosReviewed onIntel i7 13700HX, RTX 4080 (mobile), 32GB RAMSteam DeckUnknownLinkOfficial siteCheck Amazon

What is it?History-spanning 4X grand strategy game or: Phil Spencer’s Civilization

Expect to pay£50/$60 (included in Game Pass)

Release dateSeptember 24, 2024

DeveloperOxide Games

PublisherXbox Game Studios

Reviewed onIntel i7 13700HX, RTX 4080 (mobile), 32GB RAM

Steam DeckUnknown

LinkOfficial site

Check Amazon

George Washington and I go way back—around three millennia, give or take a hundred years. He may have been Buddhist while my Korean people were devoted to the pantheon of Hellenic gods, but we traded goods and propelled each other’s research, arriving in Ara: History Untold’s Era of Antiquity with the world at our feet.

(Image credit: Xbox Games Studios)

Chatting to George Washington

At the macro level, Microsoft and Oxide Games' stab at the Civy-likey turn-based strategy genre is a fine vehicle for the bonkers stories that arise from a randomised alternative history mish-mashing the key people, technological advancements, and nations of our own. For Civ players, the key elements are all there—government types, religion, war, technological progress, diplomacy, and a bunch of familiar features given new names, from wonders (now triumphs) to great works (masterpieces). But at a time when the history-themed 4X genre is looking rather populous, does Ara do enough to stand the test of time?

It certainly makes a jaunt through history visually appealing. Ara is a sight to behold and Oxide Games knows it, which is why it’s given us the ability to zoomallthe way in to see the life of our great nation up close—hundreds of little folk wandering around towns, tilling the fields, worshipping at temples, dancing jigs in the streets, and going about their daily lives (oh, and there’s an inexplicable abundance of raccoons walking among them, for some reason).

In the wilderness, wolves chase deer through the forests and bird flocks fly in formation; in a besieged city, people mindlessly run around in sheer panic while archers or artillery rain hell down on them. Likewise, during battles you can watch fully 3D-rendered simulations each turn. None of these are make-or-break features, but they do give a wonderful sense of scale and liveliness to the world in a genre that can sometimes feel a bit abstracted. Now I’ve seen this, the thought of going back to the deserted cities of other 4X games seems a tad bleak.

(Image credit: Xbox Games Studios)

A close up of a medieval settlement

The city-building mechanics are great too. As your city grows, you pick a region to claim, with each region being made up of 2-5 zones that you can place buildings in. You’re encouraged to create dedicated districts, as various production buildings—farms, apothecaries, weavers—grant bonuses for having buildings of the same type in the same region. You really have to think about what goes where, and what type of production to focus on given the surrounding resources for your city to thrive. With the help of tiles that follow the contours of the land (as opposed to traditional hexes), cities end up looking organic, with swathes of farmland, busy docklands, bustling traders' districts, and mining regions, not to mention triumphs like the Pyramids, the Great Lighthouse, and (that true marvel of modern engineering), The London Eye, all of which look fantastic.

Ara starts you off at the beginning of human history with a single city. From here you build more cities, gather resources, and meet (and inevitably war with) other civilisations, all while making sure that your key currencies of gold, food, timber, and materials stay in the green. Your goal is to make your civilisation the greatest in human history, taking it on a millennia-long journey from the spearmen of the Ancient Era to—in Ara’s case—the mech warriors in the Singularity Era.

Divide and conquer

(Image credit: Xbox Games Studios)

Ara’s map

Inevitably though, this new land too gets filled, and that frisson of excitement dissipates to reveal to you what Ara is most of the time, which isn’t bad exactly, but certainly a bit thin. Diplomacy is threadbare for a start. The fully animated avatars for the game’s substantial roster of 36 leaders look great, but lacking in dialogue, they’re void of personality. They may as well be mannequins with an unusual hankering for war, even when it’s clearly not in their best interest (like trying to capture a city that they have to cross your entire territory to get to). There’s no flexibility to negotiations, no way of setting extortionate truce terms, and relationship bars deplete so fast—due largely to a wonky warmonger penalty system—that everyone seems like an enemy to everyone else at all times.

(Image credit: Xbox Games Studios)

Two clashing armies

Combat, meanwhile, recalls the ‘stacks of doom’ of Civilization 4. There’s some interesting stuff in terms of arranging stacks into specific formations for combat bonuses, and ranged combat from adjacent tiles allows for a degree of sneaky guerrilla tactics, but for the most part it’s ‘army with bigger number wins,’ with the smaller number getting wiped out. I wish that Ara’s irregular-shaped tiles served a more tactical purpose so that crossing a river or attacking units in forested areas would factor into battle calculations, or that you could try to pull back from battles then use terrain, movement, and positioning to overcome numerical disadvantages.

Units level up, but you can’t customise or upgrade them to their more modern equivalents, so here too things are a bit too automated. It’s lovely watching battles play out in 3D view, but it seems like a bit of a luxury when resources could’ve been better put to refining the core combat instead; you shouldn’t build a palace while the people are starving (I mean, I would and I did in Ara, but that’s necessary so I can sit around drinking wine and coming up with pithy proverbs).

(Image credit: Xbox Games Studios)

The city management screen

Things get a lot more hands-on with the crafting system. Buildings like bakeries, blacksmiths, and workshops are used to craft items that you then deploy to temporarily boost key city attributes like happiness, health, and city security, or swap in and out of buildings for smaller but long-term city bonuses.

(Image credit: Xbox Games Studios)

Ara’s map zoomed all the way out

In its current form, Ara is 4X Lite, a pretty princeling next to the great emperors of the genre. But being lightweight has its plus side. It has very little bloat, so the different systems of the game never clash or confuse (a problem for its peers Millennia and Humankind). Combine that with a lovely aesthetic and well integrated info boxes and tooltips, and Ara is a very accessible jaunt for 4X newcomers, if not quite beefy enough to go toe-to-toe with the genre’s heavy hitters.

Ara: History Untold: Price Comparison

No price informationCheck Amazon

Amazon

No price informationCheck Amazon

No price information

We check over 250 million products every day for the best prices

The Verdict70Read our review policyAra: History UntoldA beautifully presented and accessible game in a sometimes obscure genre, Ara: History Untold is a pretty picture book rather than a deep tome.

The Verdict

70Read our review policyAra: History UntoldA beautifully presented and accessible game in a sometimes obscure genre, Ara: History Untold is a pretty picture book rather than a deep tome.

70Read our review policy

Ara: History UntoldA beautifully presented and accessible game in a sometimes obscure genre, Ara: History Untold is a pretty picture book rather than a deep tome.

Ara: History Untold

A beautifully presented and accessible game in a sometimes obscure genre, Ara: History Untold is a pretty picture book rather than a deep tome.

TOPICSXbox Game Studios

TOPICS

More about ara history untoldAra: History Untold looks a lot like Civilization until you realize there’s no hexes: ‘We’re not playing a board game, we’re actually trying to simulate some of what we see in real life’Microsoft’s answer to Civilization looks, well, a lot like Civilization, but has twists like simultaneous turn resolutionLatestI tried a sim racing rig that generates ‘wind’ at CES 2025 and it’s claimed to help keep VR nausea at baySee more latest►

More about ara history untold

Ara: History Untold looks a lot like Civilization until you realize there’s no hexes: ‘We’re not playing a board game, we’re actually trying to simulate some of what we see in real life’Microsoft’s answer to Civilization looks, well, a lot like Civilization, but has twists like simultaneous turn resolution

Ara: History Untold screenshot

Ara: History Untold looks a lot like Civilization until you realize there’s no hexes: ‘We’re not playing a board game, we’re actually trying to simulate some of what we see in real life’

Image for Microsoft’s answer to Civilization looks, well, a lot like Civilization, but has twists like simultaneous turn resolution

Microsoft’s answer to Civilization looks, well, a lot like Civilization, but has twists like simultaneous turn resolution

LatestI tried a sim racing rig that generates ‘wind’ at CES 2025 and it’s claimed to help keep VR nausea at baySee more latest►

Latest

I tried a sim racing rig that generates ‘wind’ at CES 2025 and it’s claimed to help keep VR nausea at bay

Nitro Concepts CES 2025 booth with a sim racing rig that offered wind simulation from twin fans near the wheelbase.

I tried a sim racing rig that generates ‘wind’ at CES 2025 and it’s claimed to help keep VR nausea at bay

See more latest►

Most PopularTurtle Beach Stealth Pivot reviewIkea Matchspel gaming chair reviewASRock DeskMini X600 reviewZotac Zbox Magnus EN374070C reviewMinisforum AtomMan G7 Ti reviewSamsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra reviewNoctua NH-D15 G2 reviewGulikit KK3 Max reviewBallionaire reviewMarvel Rivals reviewBe Quiet! Dark Rock 5 review

Most Popular

Turtle Beach Stealth Pivot review

Ikea Matchspel gaming chair review

ASRock DeskMini X600 review

Zotac Zbox Magnus EN374070C review

Minisforum AtomMan G7 Ti review

Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra review

Noctua NH-D15 G2 review

Gulikit KK3 Max review

Ballionaire review

Marvel Rivals review

Be Quiet! Dark Rock 5 review

HARDWARE BUYING GUIDESLATEST GAME REVIEWS1Best Steam Deck accessories in Australia for 2025: Our favorite docks, powerbanks and gamepads2Best graphics card for laptops: the mobile GPUs I’d want in my next gaming laptop3Best mini PCs in 2025: The compact computers I love the most4Best 14-inch gaming laptop: The top compact gaming laptops I’ve held in these hands5Best Mini-ITX motherboards in 2025: My pick from all the mini mobo marvels I’ve tested1Thank Goodness You’re Here! review: An anarchic treasure trove of jokes and skits2Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island review—like juggling chainsaws on horseback3WD Black SN850X 8 TB NVMe SSD review4Ikea Utespelare desk review5Asus ROG Harpe Ace Mini wireless mouse review

HARDWARE BUYING GUIDESLATEST GAME REVIEWS

1Best Steam Deck accessories in Australia for 2025: Our favorite docks, powerbanks and gamepads

A bunch of the best Steam Deck accessories on a blue background.

1Best Steam Deck accessories in Australia for 2025: Our favorite docks, powerbanks and gamepads

Best Steam Deck accessories in Australia for 2025: Our favorite docks, powerbanks and gamepads

2Best graphics card for laptops: the mobile GPUs I’d want in my next gaming laptop

Best graphics card for laptops: the mobile GPUs I’d want in my next gaming laptop

3Best mini PCs in 2025: The compact computers I love the most

Best mini PCs in 2025: The compact computers I love the most

4Best 14-inch gaming laptop: The top compact gaming laptops I’ve held in these hands

Best 14-inch gaming laptop: The top compact gaming laptops I’ve held in these hands

5Best Mini-ITX motherboards in 2025: My pick from all the mini mobo marvels I’ve tested

Best Mini-ITX motherboards in 2025: My pick from all the mini mobo marvels I’ve tested

1Thank Goodness You’re Here! review: An anarchic treasure trove of jokes and skits

Thank Goodness You’re Here review

1Thank Goodness You’re Here! review: An anarchic treasure trove of jokes and skits

Thank Goodness You’re Here! review: An anarchic treasure trove of jokes and skits

2Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island review—like juggling chainsaws on horseback

Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island review—like juggling chainsaws on horseback

3WD Black SN850X 8 TB NVMe SSD review

WD Black SN850X 8 TB NVMe SSD review

4Ikea Utespelare desk review

Ikea Utespelare desk review

5Asus ROG Harpe Ace Mini wireless mouse review

Asus ROG Harpe Ace Mini wireless mouse review

Our Verdict#

Divide and conquer#

Our Verdict

Divide and conquer