Recent reviews by Thomahawk2k

Regretfully not really worth buying in my opinion. Rome Total War is a classic I've played to death in my childhood. The remaster makes it run really smoothly on modern machines and look significantly better than the original, which is great.
The flip side of the coin is however that path-finding became worse than the original RTW and everything else that is "new" is either not actually new (with the exception of the emergent Ostrogoth, Slavic and Romano-British factions the "new" factions could actually rather easily be enabled in the old RTW and they still have the lack of unit diversity that probably was the reason they were disabled by default in the original) or do not actually add anything to the game (merchants).
A common complaint I've seen elsewhere is the UI. I don't really agree with this, because although I do regret that it is so different, taking away from the nostalgia hit, one can get used to it (at least I could). It does not, however, renew the gameplay in any way.
Fundamentally it is still the Rome Total War from 2004. The new lick of paint is nice, and the game is great for its time. I did get two nice nostalgia-inducing campaigns out of it, that I did enjoy, one in the regular campaign and one in Barbarian Invasion. However, since then, I have not felt much motivation to do another one. While I can't rule out an occasional return for a nostalgia hit, I can't say I think this is worth the €15 price tag. For a new player who has not seen all the ins and outs of the original, there is likely a lot more playtime to be extracted from it still. Unfortunately, that means the price is doubled because you will not have owned the original (and as I understand it, this will be for everyone after the 31st of May, also veterans), which I would again judge to not be worth it for a game this old (by a long shot). If you buy the game in a sale I would judge €8-10 to be a fair price for what it is.
I would have recommended trying the original and then judging whether the graphics and performance are worth the extra expense to buy the remastered version. Unfortunately, the original is only available tied to the remastered version, an admission of weakness in my view as it shows that the developer does not want their new version to compete with the original, even if it became possible again, it would likely not come with a reduction in price to make up for your purchase of the original.
In conclusion, unless the remastered game is discounted to below €10, I would unfortunately not recommend Rome Remastered to veterans or new players alike. If they were to make a Medieval II remake now, I would not buy it unless the game was significantly cheaper than this one.

Scriptum ante Literas: I didn't get this game for free from the devs but from a giveaway on the internet (along with two other games, even if it was initiated by the dev, at least I couldn't track that)...

Pro's:
- Nice and hard missions, and a significant amount (150) of them too.
- Availability of an easy, hard and comet freemode too (in my experience easy is harder than hard :P)
- Different ships with different stats...
- Original idea
- Awesome soundtrack that fits greatly (that is without the dlc)
Cons:
- Outrageously expensive when not on sale; I thought the price was €0,99 which it is at the time of writing this review due to sale, and I thought: this is actually worth more than that, however, apparently it's €9,99; per hour playtime that probably won't become less than €1,00/hour, and seeing as it's foremost a timekiller, I'd better bought GTA or something.

Improvement points (specifically for the dev):
- Some missions impair eachother, making them extraordinarily difficult, like having to stay inside a 50 meter target while having huge comets because you have to destroy them from that size. Being able to choose to disable a mission temporarily so you can do the other two first would be nice)
- You can kill the invincible chaser by choosing the ship that can take a second hit, making the missions surrounding the invincible chaser a walk in the park.

Would've been the worst game I ever bought if it wasn't for the profit of 2 cents (Yes really, omg) by selling it's cards...

1/10 wouldn't even try to play it again, (unless it nets me profit again)...

(Oh, and why I didn't like, just because everything is black with white Russian text in the corner at a certain point, and I couldn't find out how the flashlight worked...)

*Finds DETOUR on sale for 19 cents...*
*Finds in steam wallet exactly 19 cents...*
*Plays DETOUR*
*Get's three trading cards*
*Sells trading cards together for 27 cents (with 6 cents of that going to Valve and the dev)*

$$/10, would make money again

Just as good as any other total war game, I don't see why everyone complains about certain problems. And if you really think the game isn't fun enough with vanilla, use mods, there are a lot of very useful ones at the workshop.