The Forgotten Players – History Untold

With the first announcement of the game ARA History Untold, the game piqued my curiosity, especially for someone who loves this genre of games. The strategy game genre has always been my favorite because the game presents a challenge, as well as reactions to my decisions. However, the sub-genre of 4X strategy games has always been beautiful in its first hours, but over time, the fun begins to diminish. This is because the win objectives set by the game often result in one of the opponents being the first with a significant lead. However, the development team at Oxide promised the beloved audience of this genre that their game is different and will add something that may permanently change the genre. Did the development team live up to the promises? Or did the promises end in disappointments? This is what we will find out in the review.

• Game Name: ARA History Untold
• Developer: Oxide Games
• Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
• Genre: 4X Strategy
• Platforms: PC
• Review Platform: PC
• Release Date: 24/9/2024
• For more information, you can visit the official website of the game

Gameplay Style

It’s difficult to review a strategy game without explaining its mechanics. So, we will delve into explaining the most important mechanics of the game and then see if the game really created a cohesive and coherent design.

Civilization Leaders

As is customary in this genre, the developer introduces a variety of leaders throughout history. However, what was interesting about ARA game is that it introduced a significant number of leaders as a starting point (usually leaders are released as additions to this type of games). The game features 42 main leaders, each with positive and negative attributes.

Simple Beginning

The game starts like the beginning of any civilization, with a small piece of land containing some basic resources. To develop the main center of the starting point (the city), you start gathering resources such as food, gold, metal, and wood. These resources are the cornerstone for building various structures like the blacksmith, fishing center, farm, and wood factory, as well as providing food for the community, which reflects on their growth and reproduction. After developing the Growth ratio in the city, the player is given the right to assert control over an area or what is known as Claim Region. The benefit of this lies in expansion first, as well as providing more resources and building structures to develop faster.

Science is the Basis of Development

The other side of development is through research, which provides you with the basic system for progressing in the game and also for completing the game. The game is presented in three acts, so in the first act, you embark on Ancient-Bronze-Iron-Antiquities. After completing a certain number of research developments, the game allows you to transition between eras within the same act. When you reach the final era, you move to the next act. Upon transition, different centers are identified (which we will delve into in another part of the review). Based on these centers, some players are eliminated, giving the feeling that civilizations have fallen over time. This added a very beautiful touch, especially as you see the ruins of these cities and civilizations. Developments enhance the country’s strengths in various aspects, such as the governance system, modern agricultural methods, new manufacturing methods that facilitate manufacturing and agriculture operations, as well as accelerating the production of special products. Also, learning the basic system of trade, building roads, crossing seas, and reaching artificial intelligence in the modern era. Here, ARA differs from some games in the same genre, as the goal in some other games is to travel to space, while our game touches our current reality and the rush of companies and countries investing in artificial intelligence.

Construction

The ARA game does not rely on the hex system like its counterparts in the genre, but rather relies on the Zone system, where in each land area there are a number of zones in which you can build structures such as farms, factories, army training centers, barracks, and more. This made the game closely resemble city-building games and added beauty to seeing the city evolve between eras. Each building has a value known as Production Point, which helps the building in production. This value can be accelerated through the supply system, which are tools that are produced or traded to speed up the production wheel in the city. This system added value to planning in a deeper way, and also added a challenge to resource manufacturing and knowledge about the supply chain system. The game’s proximity to this system is similar to the game ANNO. Coordinating production lines and planning for them gives a greater chance to advance over the opponent by a significant margin, and this is where the role of the leader in planning shines. Personally, this system is addictive and made me continue playing for long hours, thinking about how to build a coherent economy that provides a synergistic effect.

Diplomatic Relations

As is known in the strategy game genre that is characterized by this classification, political relations with neighboring countries play a vital role. My main concern with the ARA game is that the diplomatic system in the game is superficial. You do not have many options available, such as sending gifts to improve your political relations, declaring war, opening borders, and finally, trading. However, I expected the diplomatic relations system to be deeper, but it wasn’t. I hope that it will be improved in future updates because it is currently one of the most superficial political relations systems in this genre.

War is the Last Resort

It is natural for a strategy and civilization-building game to have a war system. The ARA game has a large arsenal of military units, starting from simple archers and spearmen to modern tanks, rockets, and aircraft. The war system here is more in-depth, and when requesting military units, you can organize them, whether in follow-up rows carrying long-range forces and close-range forces, front defensive forces, as well as long-range missile attack forces. You can also engage different forces to bombard cities and sabotage sensitive enemy areas. But what hampers the war is that it is tied to a specific time period, and I didn’t find an option to remove this time constraint. Sometimes you wish the time could be shorter, especially if war is declared on you when you don’t have soldiers.

Innovative Multiplayer System

When I talked about whether the ARA game added anything new to the 4X genre that we might see in future games of this type? The answer is yes, and it is the addition of simultaneous role rotation. What this means is that in other games of this type, you would give your own commands, then allow your opponent to make their moves and give their own commands. Here, you have to wait for the other players to finish their moves until you make yours again. It makes it difficult to play multiplayer with others. Whereas in the ARA game, you give your own commands and other players do the same at the same time. A certain time is set, whether 30 seconds or more, to transition to the subsequent time period. Microsoft’s cloud system helps with this. One beautiful thing is that you can modify the settings to make a single turn last up to 7 real days, and the game is saved in the cloud system, allowing each person to enter and modify the plan. This allows for a multiplayer game to continue for weeks, and even months. I liked this system and wished it was implemented in video games of this classification in the past, especially since I love a certain old board game called Diplomacy.

A New Epoch and Falling Nations

After explaining the game mechanics briefly, we come to what is different in the game, which keeps you competing until the last moment and striving to survive. There is what is known as Prestige, and countries are classified based on it. This Prestige comes from several areas such as scientific development, rare buildings like the pyramids, Eiffel Tower, hanging gardens, or even the population’s satisfaction and their living standards in general. Or military strength. All of these allow you to gather points to compete for the first place. After the end of each act, as mentioned earlier that there are three acts, two civilizations are completely eliminated, and you see the remnants of these countries. This evokes the feeling that these countries have indeed been through times and have lagged in development until they collapsed. This feeling is beautiful, especially if you are from the lagging positions and are trying to continue and develop the country quickly.

Coherence of Gameplay Systems

With the amount of different systems in the game, I believe that the game offered something new and unique in its classification. The game, for me, was enjoyable, and I had fun spending many hours playing it and understanding its mechanics. However, what was frustrating for me was the diplomatic system and relations between countries that were somewhat disappointing. Overall, I will spend more hours playing the game in the coming period.

Artistic and Technical Level

The graphics in the game are beautiful, as well as the artistic direction and the country’s vision through its expansion. Also, the people moving between the city’s edges and different cities were very beautiful. The intricate details in the game impressed me, variations in building shapes, military units, and the developer’s attention to character design impressed me.

The game’s sounds are somewhat ordinary and not crucial to the experience, but what is essential is the beautiful soundtrack that added beauty to the game’s artistic direction in general. Also, the voice-over that narrates the history as events progress and reads information about historical characters that appear to you over time, such as John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, who wrote the Lord of the Rings novel.

The game’s technical performance between turns suffered somewhat from stuttering, lasting for a brief moment, even with an i9 13900K processor and a 4090 graphics card. The game suffers from this issue, especially in the early ages, and the problem persists and becomes more prominent as you progress through the eras and expand your countries.