Ara: History Untold is the latest in a procession of turn-based 4X games trying to settle on the once-sovereign territory of Sid Meier's Civilization, and it's one of the more competent challengers to do so. The liveliness and detail of its animated towns and cities never fail to delight me – as a historical ant farm, at least. But it expects more of us as a world leader than Civ ever has, and doesn't really provide us with the tools to make it truly feel good to be the king.
On a basic level, Ara doesn't have a vastly different view of history from its 4X forebears. Starting from roughly Neolithic times, you race down a tech tree split up into three acts of four ages each along a familiar and narrow path based mostly on Europe and its colonial offshoots. One little twist I did appreciate is that the final, futuristic era has a lot more to do with general AI, transhumanism, and cybernetics than going to space, which I think is a necessary and likely step on the path ahead of us that often gets skipped over in favor of interstellar travel.
Much like Civ, Ara lets you select from an array of historical leaders who appear in a simple but expressive 3D style. Alongside familiar faces like Caesar and Shaka Zulu, we also get some less conventional "rulers" like Copernicus for Poland and Sappho for Greece, which is a nice touch. Their bonuses are all underwhelmingly passive, though.
None of them can really do anything the others can't. And there are no culturally unique units – .