Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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Build a nation starting at any point in human history and compete for supremacy in this epic turn-based strategy game. Engage in diplomacy, fight wars, and go head-to-head with other leaders from history.
Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition is a strategy, 4x and grand strategy game
developed by Oxide Games
and published by Xbox Game Studios.
Released on September 24th 2025 is available only on Windows
in 26 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish - Spain, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese - Brazil, Portuguese - Portugal, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish - Latin America, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Vietnamese and Malay.
It has received 1,790 reviews of which 1,231 were positive and 559 were negative resulting in a rating of 6.7 out of 10. 😐
The game is currently priced at 49.99€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition through various videos and screenshots.
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 (20H1) or later
- Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2400G – Intel i5-5300U
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 480 – Nvidia GeForce GTX 970
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: 50 GB available space
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
With the release of 2.0 I feel I can finally recommend this game. Ara comes with it's own take on the 4x "civ like" style of game, where the focus is on the production of the ever more complex resources that your civilisation needs. With the original 1.0 release the game suffered from a very bad case of micromanagement requirements, but that has been considerably improved for the 2.0 release. The AI is also doing much better now and will be a good challenge on the appropriate difficulty level. Combat is fairly simple in the game, more similar to something like EU4 than Civ, but honestly that works for me as the micro focus shifts to managing the economy and crafting of the various production chains. This game offers one of the most amazing descriptions of what the industrial age must've been like on a historic scale, as you find yourself suddenly being able to produce incredible goods that have huge impact on your people or your armies, that in turn need huge quantities of lesser goods that can only be produced in the needed quantities by standing up dozens of factories and rushing to acquire sources of coal to power everything and seeing the health of your cities plummet all the while. I hope to see more development on Ara, it does it's own thing and it's pretty good at it!
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It is basically a good game marred by the general lack of game design expertise prevalent in the industry right now. There are to many developers creating games from their player expertise rather than game design expertise, and those are entirely different skills. The game would be perfectly fine if the game designers didn't see themselves in the role of trying to compete with the players rather than just provide them with an enjoyable game. The challenges provided by the game tend to be "Spoiling" at every opportunity, and a lot of the set up is around helping the AI to compete. Most starts even on the easiest difficulties are unwinnable. You are given no resources, and dropped in the middle of three or more AI civs that settle all over the map around you and each other. Particularly as you are trying to learn the game, for which there is little instruction, this makes it a very frustrating experience. It ends up with you serially restarting the game 20 or so times, to get a playable game and then learning the game by trail and error. If you do make it through to the middle ages the game is by then not a challenge, because you will be so far ahead. I don't know if the designers think their customers are idiots, but it isn't hard to see which starts are an exercise in futility. If you don't find grain or any other food source in your first 2 cities, you might as well start again. The developers seem to care, and my advice is to get the game, so that it is easy to win and play at normal level, forget about making it a challenge. Make the AI civs non-aggressive and only settle away from the player. Let the player win. Once you have that working, then try to get the game more challenging on higher difficulties. Try to understand that you want players to win. No one wants to play a game they never win, and it really isn't clever as a designer to make a game so that players cant win it. In fact is rather ignorant to derive any satisfaction from that. The AI should be trying to make the player win, but put up a good fight, not win the game itself. If the AI wins at normal difficulty, then the AI is a failure.
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Ara is a really good game. I played first on game pass and bought it here later. No civ clone but an alternative with many different concepts and different focus. Clearly to recommend, but maybe not for all. At first some of the concepts can be confusing, but when you get into it, most makes sense. Resources and Crafting to produce amenities for your cities and equipment for your units are a main focus. You need some time to understand what is important and how many workshops, potteries, forges, ... you need to build by when so that everything runs smoothly and with limited micro management. If you like creating and optimizing your production chains, this is your game. Era changes are included with the main impact that the weakest nations are removed (but no, no nation/civ changes). This increases the challenge to survive and works well for me, but I saw also many criticizing it in the beginning, so maybe not for everyone. The map has no hexes, but is divided in small provinces with 1-6 subregions where you can build farms or buildings. As your cities grow, you claim more. Borders look more natural. Food generation and city production are not only dependent on the fertility of a province. It depends a lot on city size, improvements and corresponding adjacency boni, city happiness, assigned specialists,... The resulting values can be at first hard to predict, but it makes more sense after a while. Units and warfare are on a first look more simplified. You build units into a reserve pool and muster them in combined squads (in any city, not only the producing one). Certain combinations inside the squad give you boni. Battles are in the end often decided by who brings more to the battlefield/province maybe including supporting fire from squads with archers etc from neighboring provinces. If you want a more complex battle simulation, be cautious here. Might be not for you. But overall it works fine. Diplomacy is okay. Nothing spectacular so far. Not every relation change is clear, but also not too random. More unique is the idea, that wars have goals and a timer leading to an auto-peace. It is good and avoids prolonged wars, but might also appear as too artificial for some. V1.3 is announced to bring improvements to diplomacy. I am looking forward to what it will bring. AI opponents are on high difficulties competitive in the first half of the game. Later they fall back . Devs mentioned that AI improvements are on their list and I hope they can do more here too keep Ara more challenging in the long term Trade is very simplified for a game with so many goods. Beside AI improvements, a new system here would be my biggest wish, even if it comes later as paid content. There would be more to mention, but this is enough for me now. Finally I would like to add that the developers look for feedback and continue to work on it. New patches are coming to improve the game, not very fast but steadily.
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I'm gonna give this game a guarded "thumbs up." The game (rightly) invites comparisons with the Civilization series. Much is similar - each nation has particular strengths and bonuses (and sometimes maluses). You build cities, and as these cities expand (in Ara through growth-driven annexation of regions, comprised of zones, with one build option per zone) the cities become more powerful. There are some standard features (like Wonders of the World, which Ara calls 'triumphs') and bonus-giving governors (which Ara calls 'paragons' and there's a lot more of them). But it's NOT Civ - the gameplay is much different and you gotta keep that in mind. Some have called it the lovechild of Civ and Anno ... I'm inclined to include Vicky somewhere in the parentage. But the key point is that economic management is MUCH more prominent - and it involves developing chains of industries that will produce ever-more-sophisticated (and powerful) goods. Civ economics is checkers; Ara economics is chess (or perhaps even go). I have found it to be utterly fascinating and absorbing, but YMMV. Gameplay dynamics are different from Civ; you've gotta retool your thinking. (One example: producing more food doesn't directly lead to population growth ... what matters is building structures that enhance the growth rate. These just happen to produce more food, but it's the growth rate not the food that's the primary driver.) This gameplay difference is a major plus - we don't need another Civ clone. Unfortunately, the information needed to retool that thinking is often obscure or unavailable. What's driving the population growth of my city? I'm given partial information (the farm is boosting growth rate 3%, for example) but I'm lacking the complete picture. How many zones are in that region? That's important for city planning, but is only easily available when I can expand my city. What does it take to get another paragon? This thwarts my OCD tendencies to min-max things ... but even more importantly hinders my ability even to build appropriate strategies. I'm not playing blind ... but my game vision is far less than 20/20. So I'll give it a moderately enthusiastic endorsement. If you're looking for a Civ clone you will be disappointed. If you're looking for something simple, this is not the game for you. But if you're looking for a different take on the 4X historical genre, and want to invest some time and effort in discovering and mastering some deep gameplay, then this would be an excellent (albeit suboptimally documented) choice.
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After having played this game for 103.3 hours. I "may" have a handle on what it is and isn't from my perspective. I thought I'd wait to write this until I played a full game with the 1.1 update. If I had written this review before the 1.1 update, I would have said the game is a really boring and tedious. After playing a full game with the 1.1 update, I think I can halfheartedly recommend the game. It's better with the 1.1 update, but I believe it still needs work. The national economy improvement somewhat reduces your number of clicks,, but it is still tedious especially as your number of cities grow. It's great that units can be upgraded. The main screen, though, remains way too crowded, and zooming in and out does little to fix that. Battles are relatively boring to watch. Anyway, on a scale of 1 to 10, I would give the game a 6. Maybe further improvements will make it more fun, but the game can be tedious, especially near the end. Not going to rush back to play it again until additional improvements for done.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition is currently priced at 49.99€ on Steam.
Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 49.99€ on Steam.
Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition received 1,231 positive votes out of a total of 1,790 achieving a rating of 6.68.
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Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition was developed by Oxide Games and published by Xbox Game Studios.
Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition is playable and fully supported on Windows.
Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition is not playable on MacOS.
Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition is not playable on Linux.
Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition offers both single-player and multi-player modes.
Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition offers both Co-op and PvP modes.
There are 4 DLCs available for Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition . Explore additional content available for Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition on Steam.
Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition does not support mods via Steam Workshop.
Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition does not support Steam Remote Play.
Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition .
Data sources
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Additionally, we incorporate data from the SteamSpy API, which offers insights into game sales and player statistics. This helps us present a comprehensive view of each game's popularity and performance within the gaming community.
Last Updates| Steam data | 23 October 2025 16:23 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 23 October 2025 21:05 |
| Steam price | 29 October 2025 12:30 |
| Steam reviews | 29 October 2025 11:50 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition , we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition compatibility
Game modes
Multiplayer
Features
Online players
67
Developer
Oxide Games
Publisher
Xbox Game Studios
Release
24 Sep 2025
Platforms