For almost a week, Ara: History Untold has been playable on Steam and in Game Pass. The 4x strategy game has been seen as a rival to Civilization. Yet even the players who want to love Ara: History Untold sound frustrated. They seem like a support group on reddit, venting their frustrations. They want to love the game, but Ara: History Untold simply won’t let them.
What is Ara: History Untold? At its core, Ara: History Untold is a classic city-building game, and you dedicate a lot of time and love to optimally developing your up to 10 cities. There is a complex crafting system in the buildings with countless resources.
Ara combines city-building with 4x gameplay: You explore the area, research technologies, conquer cities, and eliminate your opponents. In Ara, you earn prestige for everything; anyone who has too little prestige at the end of an era is eliminated from the game, leaving only ruins and splendid wide fields for their rivals to build new cities on.
Ara looks great and has enormous potential, as many believe, but it makes it almost impossible for players to love it.
Players complain about micromanagement hell
This is the discussion: On reddit , a player summarizes his impression of Ara: History Untold with “I’m out – at least for now.”
The player says he understands what the developers were trying to do. But the game turns into a “micromanagement hell” in the mid-game, and it simply isn’t fun.
“Once I was in a workshop and installed a gear to produce gears faster – what’s the point of that?”
The interface and user guidance are so poor that he once spent minutes looking for a tannery because he no longer remembered which city it was in. He will keep following the game and would love to jump back into Ara, but only when there are major changes to the interface and the micromanagement.
The player does not feel bad about Ara: History Untold. After all, he only paid one euro through the Xbox Game Pass.
The game is great and wants to be better, but …
Here’s how others discuss it: Many reddit users agree with him: The game is great in itself and wants to be even better, but from Act 2, that is, in the mid-game, Ara: History Untold is simply torture and frustration.
There are endless improvements and workshops in the game. One user says:
“Finding enough food for a large city is a nightmare; even when you have a stockpile of 600, it’s gone immediately. So you’re constantly chasing after something new: You’re hunting for a refrigerator, carpets, toaster, light bulbs, pigs, cows, sandwiches, knives, forks, table, chairs, and so on and so forth.
The game turns into Settlers but without an acceptable interface.”
The sentiment seems to be unanimous: The game is great in itself, but as soon as Act 2 begins and you have more and more tools and resources to choose from, Ara: History Untold becomes a nightmare for micromanagers and is no longer fun.
But the game has the potential to be great. People want to love it; Ara: History Untold just doesn’t let them. MeinMMO author Schuhmann is also part of the support group Ara Anonymous: I spent 40 hours with the new strategy game on Steam in 3 days – but I can’t recommend it to anyone
