Good for city-builder fans. Otherwise it's probably too difficult.
At the beginning of the game you'll create a character who will be your persistent character throughout the entire game, campaign, free play, or multiplayer. You choose a portrait to visually represent him and a family, which grants various bonuses. There are five families: the Flavii, Valerii, Julii, Aemilii or Lucii. As I said before, each family grants you various bonuses, either economic or military. For example the militant Aemilii have the support of the middle-class and make far superior military troops. Meanwhile the benevolent Julii rule over the plebs and get massive bonuses to farming. Depending on your play style, each family can be useful.
As you play through the game, accomplishing objectives, you'll earn talent points and personal wealth. Talent points can be spent in three skill trees that will give you various benefits. For example spending a point under the military trees cuts your troop costs and recruitment times in half. Again talents, like your family bonus, can also support other branches such as Economic or Political.
Personal wealth is primarily used to purchase estates. These estates represent "plantations" that your family owns and you can find ones that provide slaves, wheat, iron, stone, and more. Every estate you buy carries over mission to mission and can be just what you need to maintain the that stone wall, or prevent starvation. While overall the RPG elements have little impact, they're a nice touch to the game and make it feel unique. Besides, you may just play it over with a different character.
There are two campaigns (if you have the Gold edition). One follows your family after the death of Sulla, the other follows the Reign of Augustus. Each campaign has multiple missions, and the variety in each is pretty good. Early missions are as simple as building 15 houses, while later ones turn into truly epic challenges. One of the things Grand Ages does very well is map design. Each map has it's own unique challenges (like distant water) which means that even after 20+ missions each town you build will still look unique and different.
Like most city-builders you have food, and material buildings. For example while grain can be eaten raw, it's more fulfilling if it's ground into flour, and baked into bread. Material production is the gathering of bricks, iron, and stone for various building projects. Most buildings use bricks, walls and towers require stone, and iron is used to make weapons for troops. Each building has a radius and if any house is to be "serviced" it must remain in that radius. Of course there are radius-expanding buildings such as markets to help deliver food to distant housing, but overall city building requires careful planning.
In order to cut down on micromanagement, Grand Ages Rome uses "flowing" resources. This means that resources never accumulate as a stockpile and rather "flow" as long as there is a source. If you build to many bakers, then you'll have to increase the flow of wheat and flour. Of course you still can increase your flow through estates, and trade. I think flow resources are a great idea and limit the amount of needless tasks you have to perform.
Of course there's no point in making food if there's no one to eat it. There are three classes of people in the game: Plebs, Equites, and Patricians. The classes are basically lower, middle, and upper respectively. Plebs need high food quality (gained by having many types of food, or by making more fufilling food: i.e. bread vs wheat). Equites want Food variety and Entertainment. Patricians want both and then Religion on top. Each class staffs a certain building, and although that building can be manned by a lower class, it's efficiency drops significantly. It's another feature that's adds to the required city building.
This leads to one of the problems of the game: difficulty. The tutorial is woefully inadequate and there is no manual. A long time will be spent fumbling around trying to discover how things work. Once you finally due learn it, it doesn't get much easier. i can give you one word of advice, save often. it's very easy to place something wrong and watch as your city falls apart from disease and crime. Due to the flow system, if you run out of resources and don't have enough to create another building, well... you're screwed. In my opinion though this difficulty is rather realistic, and like the true Romans, planning out your city is very important.
Another problem is combat. While combat has never been a strong point of city-builders (odd given their cousin the RTS), and Grand Ages has an above average system, you can't help but see missed potential. Combat looks quite nice, and the controls are reminiscent of Total War. There's a nice variety of unit types, and each has a special ability. For example you can grant Gladiators freedom, which makes them invincible in combat, but they are disbanded afterwards.
So what's wrong with it? Well it isn't used enough. Most maps have small barbarian villages as their worst enemies, and most maps don't have any. There are no rival cities, and unless you play Multiplayer I can't see any massive battles, or even a need to have armed forces (as enemies aren't very aggressive). Despite using troops to create outposts (so you can expand your empire through other little towns, think Dawn of Discovery, or Anno 1701) I can't see much use for them. Same goes for walls and towers; primarily aesthetic.
Speaking of aesthetics, the graphics are gorgeous. The game is extremely realistic overall with all the buildings having an intricate amount of detail. The people operating these buildings have many varied animations as well. The post processing effects are the real standouts. Bad weather dims the screen and desaturates the color. Sunny days wash out the image slightly. It's realistic and very good-looking.
Grand Ages Rome is a rock solid city-builder. While it's not entirely unique, it's good fun. It's just a shame that the learning curve is so steep, and the combat so unnecessary. Still for the 19.99$ I spent, it was well worth it.