izigame.me

+-1000 hours on CIV VI and cumulatively +-1000 hours on other similar games, and many more gameplay hours with city-builders and all types of strategy games. My opinion is as follows:
ARA is a disorganized, slow, unnecessarily complex, chaotic, infuriating, patience-demanding MESS!
I will first give my score on a couple of factors that I took in mind and which I deem important for such a game, out of 10. Of course, the high cost of the game is something that largely affected my opinion in the analysis and score-giving of the following factors.
Graphics and UI: 7/10 (randomly detailed, randomly not - UI/icons etc hide the charm... detailed icons, huge icons, many icons... I'd go for a colored AOE IV icon version)
Performance: 4/10 (crashes; click-bugs; freezes; generally patience-demanding)
Acts/ages/eras: 2/10 (horrible era system - eras are only namely mentioned and the game is 3 acts - eras; the most significant thing is research and it feels incomplete and sketchy - no immersion at all - bad copy of CIV)
Maps: 3/10 (no real variety; I tried 4 randomly generated maps with different settings. Territories look dull and boring, the textures are detailed but there is no real variety, no real color, no real elevation and cliffs - mountains are simply impassable - Humankind maps look better, CIV VII maps more promising, too)
Leaders: 1/10 (very cartoonishly out of context, like you put Mr. Bean in a SAW movie - they 100% copied CIV VI here, no doubt)
Expansion: 8/10 (I do like the city cap, and territories)
Wars: 5/10 (nothing special, the AI is super dumb and will just attack for expansion till you literally wanna go play something else or quit gaming altogether)
Religion: 1/10 (no game-changer, it feels weird)
It's an attempt to create a complex game that combines Sid Meier's Civilization games, Anno and Humankind without any utility to actually apply that complexity efficiently. Full of performance issues and bugs, sometimes you have to click 3 and 4 and even 10 times to get something done. The materials, products and the buildings that make them are all over the map and the tiny, hyper-realistic circular icons that appear together are VERY difficult to distinguish from each other, so you end up clicking everywhere to find the building that you need, hoping, with your intuition and on your patience limits, that it's the one you had been looking for.
The difficulty settings are not clear. I am trying the easiest setting in an attempt to get familiar with the game while also being eager to reach the final era because I love future eras in these games. However, the easiest setting is weird. In one game, the AI was a potato, I suppose because the map was bigger so they didn't need to conquer me. In fact, I was 2 times stronger than the second AI. I gave the game up because I was overwhelmed by the production/building (and what not) UI chaos. Also, and I stress it - my device is pretty fast, the game has very annoying performance issues. No matter the settings I tried, ultra settings and lower settings give the exact same result in performance. It's just slow in average, with annoying bugs, like the game doesn't understand "left click" sometimes.
I see people comparing it to CIV games, and I did mention it, because the basis of the idea is similar to CIV, of course. Despite that, it's nothing like CIV VI for example, but not in a good way, because although the idea is refreshing, you end up having to deal with production all the time instead of actually enjoying the game. It's like Old World, but more complex and broken/chaotic.
There is no clear production line. There is no clear purpose. Everything revolves around "prestige", which is like oxygen for your empire-civ-town-village-cottage or whatever you managed to keep after being attacked 25 million times on "easiest". Am I an inexperienced player and should just suck up the wars thing? No, because it doesn't happen organically, the AI will attack you BY DEFAULT if they have no more space to expand, instead of making any attempt at trading (which is certainly not a game changer either).
The graphics? Of course, pretty beautiful, but with ALL THE MENUS you are almost unable to see anything anyway, and you need to see the yields, the borders, the huge icons for units (that render them almost invisible as well), you end up with no actual space to see those "beautiful" graphics. Although mind you, I was looking at the buildings carefully and houses look very weird; some nice houses appear that follow the trends of each age, but then suddenly you see something like unfinished CONCRETE boxes with roofs all over the place, that make no sense at all - they look like slums, minus the high density (pun intended).
To sum it up:
The game is WAY too expensive for its current quality (day of release). It's a sugarcoated early-access game and we all had to pay them the money because they obviously invested a lot in it and people had to get paid, but it's NOT A FINISHED GAME. It's an early-access game, and we have been deceived. However, I do understand the developers/beneficiaries' side, because we live in modern capitalism. I think by giving it an early-access phase, the game would have gotten way better ratings. You can't make people expect a finished game and give THIS, because when you will want to invest more on it, people will turn their backs on you. There are so many developers making new games nowadays, you can't just go and release an unfinished game for 60 euros (in my case).
Do I like the game? Yes, but it needs so much work. And start by firing whoever had the idea for this horrible UI, because the performance-killing detailed graphics aren't even visible anymore with that interface.
Also, mind you, this game ends after all research is done, and you CAN'T CONTINUE playing after the prestige winner. This is the main reason I don't want to play this game anymore.