Hail, Caesar, those who are about to die salute thee.
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
At the time of its release Total War: Rome was hailed as the most personal of strategy games - the first strategy game series to deal with planning as well as spectacle. Few things were more satisfying than watching your elephants flatten a troop of hoplites or see your calvary break a line. That was nearly a decade ago and while the game looks much better than the original Rome, not much has changed in the ensuing years. The artificial intelligence still suffers from problems that plagued the original and the design of the campaign has largely regressed.
The winning conditions for any Grand Campaign are so "grand" that they're teetering on the edge of absurd. Upwards of twenty hours into the campaign my German Confederacy extends further than Napoleon's First French Empire, from the South of England to the tip of the Iberian peninsula, to Italy and everything in between. Somehow creating a more unified Europe through brute force doesn't matter much to winning a Grand Campaign since with all of this accomplished an end is no where in sight.
This isn't to say that the game is too difficult. There's nothing too difficult about any of the campaigns, even ones that start at a huge disadvantage due to their map placement like Carthage. It's just a tedious experience. This isn't an experience I associate with the series. No matter which faction I played as in Total War: Rome or Total War: Shogun II, there was always an end in sight.That isn't to say the end isn't in sight in Rome II, but it's definitely categorized as absurd.
This accentuated by the fact that there are still a litany of issues, half a year after release aren't fixed and continue to plague the experience make it a game not worth recommending. Even if they fix the issues of broken artificial intelligence, there's not much fixing the fact that the campaign just isn't fun to play. While there's enough content to keep you busy for years, none of it quite had charm to keep me playing past the first two weeks.