It's been a while since a decent 4X game was released that didn't bear the name Civilization, and that is mostly because a lot of 4X games tend to copy a lot of what Civ does and then struggle to find their own identity. Ara: History Untold is not in that camp. And it really is untold history and the map and content of it bares no resemblance to historical accuracy, it's very much in the alt-history camp.
Whilst the game does have the staples of Expand, Explore, Exploit and Exterminate, there are aspects here that make things a little more involved in the management of your cities - but wait, we're getting ahead of ourselves. Before you get to the map, there are a load of different leaders you can select, thirty-seven of them in fact and they even have different coloured costumes that isn't extra DLC. Imagine that. Each leader gives you different stat bonuses and traits, I'm not sure at this stage how much difference this will make to the progress through the game, but it was nice to see so many options there.
When you reach your map, it's straight into city management, here the idea is to place building types and it's these that will go towards your resources - so a farm will bring in food for example and if the region you build it in has bonus stats, all the better. Your also able to progress through the tech tree through research and this then unlocks other product streams and buildings.
The overall goal is to gain prestige and win the game by having more prestige than any of your opponents, and this is gained from all the different actions you can take, things you manufacture and buildings you construct. There seems to be quite a deep and branching tree of technologies and production chains that I don't quite understand yet only having played for a couple of hours.
Overall though I'm pretty impressed by this game so far, it's definitely nice to see a game that isn't trying to be Civ, plus the help system is superb and makes up for the terrible settings menu
I give this one 9 Sid Meiers out of 10.
Whilst the game does have the staples of Expand, Explore, Exploit and Exterminate, there are aspects here that make things a little more involved in the management of your cities - but wait, we're getting ahead of ourselves. Before you get to the map, there are a load of different leaders you can select, thirty-seven of them in fact and they even have different coloured costumes that isn't extra DLC. Imagine that. Each leader gives you different stat bonuses and traits, I'm not sure at this stage how much difference this will make to the progress through the game, but it was nice to see so many options there.
When you reach your map, it's straight into city management, here the idea is to place building types and it's these that will go towards your resources - so a farm will bring in food for example and if the region you build it in has bonus stats, all the better. Your also able to progress through the tech tree through research and this then unlocks other product streams and buildings.
The overall goal is to gain prestige and win the game by having more prestige than any of your opponents, and this is gained from all the different actions you can take, things you manufacture and buildings you construct. There seems to be quite a deep and branching tree of technologies and production chains that I don't quite understand yet only having played for a couple of hours.
Overall though I'm pretty impressed by this game so far, it's definitely nice to see a game that isn't trying to be Civ, plus the help system is superb and makes up for the terrible settings menu
I give this one 9 Sid Meiers out of 10.