Ara: History Untold (2024)

A couple of things that can't make this game a 5/5:

• War is really easy to wager for no real reason: it costs only something like 5 to 10 prestige and you can earn 100 something prestige. It's fine but when someone goes from Trusted and with trade agreements to at WAR OF EXPANSIONISM in under a turn without any way of understanding their intentions it's... crippling at best.

• Some things aren't touched on at all (such as specialists, which are different from experts and they aren't in the Encarta at all) and your production per any of your sources varies wildly between a number and another, causing your city to plummet in a food stagnation despite having been fine just a few turns ago and before reaching a higher population score.

• I wish it would tell you where you're supposed to put certain wonders: the Colossus of Rhodes needs to be on a coastal tile but if I didn't know it from guessing due to their nature, I would've probably dumped a bunch of city claims in the water erroneously. It also does not say, if not in the Encarta, that you need the whole region to place a wonder, so you're essentially bartering low production and low resource zones to place wonders. Only it connects to the above issue where your production sways way too much.

You know me, I'm a sucker for 4X games and I complain about them. A lot.

Ara: History Untold is... surprisingly good! The game seems to take longer (since you're not progressing 'automatically' through ages but by researching specific technologies) than Age of Wonders 4 or Civ 6 but it doesn't leave you idle for too long either: there's always something to do every turn and, as you progress and your cities grow bigger and larger, there's much more small micromanaging to do.

I personally enjoyed having to craft a certain amount of things to get wonders done instead of focusing on production for all of them, I enjoyed seeing the mishmash of cultures going along the way and maybe.

Kinda made me re-think of the whole new approach Civilization 7 is going to have and maybe, but just maybe, I'll like the mish-mash, almost anachronistic sequelitis of events that are going to happen.

I'll review it once I'll pump out some more hours in it that aren't just multiplayer.