Highly ambitious, but the more I play, the more disappointed I am.
To me, the Total War series of games are among the best, and certainly most re-playable, games ever produced.
ETW, however, is -- and it pains me to say so -- the worst of the series. Part of the problem is that it is the victim of very high expectations, the prior games being in a class by themselves. This one -- though extremely ambitious and with lots of potential -- just doesn't meet the standards of the prior games.
TECHNICAL/BUGS:
-- One of the great things about the prior Total War games, particularly Rome and Medieval 2 -- was the stability. I very rarely -- if ever -- CTD with those games. ETW is just the opposite -- it is one of the most unstable, prone-to-crash games I've played, particularly in the latter stages of the 200 turn game. For instance, I learned through painful trial and error that clicking on a particular set of my ships on the campaign screen would cause the game to crash. The game was otherwise playable. So, after spending thousands on eight top of the line ships, I had to let them sit, without clicking on them, for the remainder of the very long game. Also, my trade and other ships would sometimes get stuck in the trade ports - for example, on the Brazil coast - and those too would be unusable for the game as they were producing no trade and could not be moved.
Clearly, this game was released too early. Of course, the developers/distributor knew about the bugs and released the game anyway. The bugs are too numerous and uniform to be one-offs. They obviously decided the negative reviews and player outrage is worth the extra revenue they would generate from an earlier release. But I hope that the gaming community can teach them a lesson by not buying this game in its current form to demonstrate that this shoddy of a product should not be released. They've tarnished their reputation and the stellar reputation of the Total War series.
And I know a lot has been said about Steam, but I disagree with the fanboys who say that we shouldn't be blaming the developers and distributors for Steam sucking arse. The developers/distributors made the decision to use that Internet bloodsucker and they should take responsibility for that decision. I HATE STEAM WITH A PASSION. Other top games are doing just fine without resorting to using Steam so please don't tell me it was necessary. Again, another decision made by the developers/distributor that they knew would piss off gamers to no end but they did it anyway for the purpose of making more $$. I just hope in the end it is proved to be a bad bargain for them.
And the time it can take between moves, once you hit the turn button on the campaign map, is outrageous. In the later stages of the Road to Independence campaign, it would sometimes take 5 minutes to cycle through all of the factions. It's not quite that bad in the regular game but it still is the worst cycle time of any game I've ever played, particularly in the latter stages of the game. It fundamentally and negatively impacts the enjoyment of the game when there is that long of a delay between each campaign turn.
GAMEPLAY:
There is something missing - maybe it is the lack of atmosphere but I just haven't been able to get into ETW as I have with Rome and Medieval, or eve Shogun. I don't feel the atmosphere I did with the past games and that is a real shame. After move 100 or so, it just feels very repetitive and mechanical, and I find myself hitting the automatically-settle-the-battle button much more often than with past Total War games.
The addition of the tech tree is a net positive, except towards the latter stages of the game when they become less important as a player increases his or her dominance over the other factions and the techs become less and less relevant to the game.
In the prior Total War games, you could choose to end the game or play on once you completed your objectives. Now, you can only complete your objectives once you've held those objectives for the entire 200 turn game. In other words, you cannot "win" until you play the whole game, every time. This is unfortunate since I've played three complete games and found that it gets quite boring and repetitive towards the last third. As I mentioned, the game is very easy, even on the hardest settings, so a decent player should be completely dominating the game two thirds of the way through.
GRAPHICS:
I've read a lot of reviews about the graphics being amazing. I couldn't disagree more. Yes, some marginal improvements over Medieval 2, and, yes, the naval battles and seas look nice. But as for land battles, I see little improvement and sometimes the infantry/cavalry look worse than Medieval 2 as they appear to be ice skating in unison across the landscape instead of walking/galloping. I expected more from the "next generation" of computer games.
I could go on but I think I've said enough.