Ave readers – those of you who bought Total War: Rome II, I salute you! My anticipation for this game could not be contained; the latest in developer Creative Assembly's Total War series, Rome II is also the long-awaited sequel to its most beloved entry and bears no small expectation. In a game about conquest and battles, after all, history offers no finer subject than the Roman empire.

There are a lot of ways to play Rome II, which may be one of its underlying problems, but the meat of the game is in campaign mode. After an extended prologue, during which you control the Roman empire while crushing some feeble Samnite opposition, the campaign lets you choose from nine starting factions and then try to take over the ancient world. Will you take Hannibal's Carthage to victory, expand relentlessly as one of several Roman families, or rewrite history as the Gauls?

The campaign map is gigantic, encompassing all of Europe and a decent portion of north Africa, and Rome II divides neatly between overarching management of your territory and up-close engagement on the battlefield. The first is turn-based strategic jostling where you manage provinces, muster armies and compete or co-operate with countless other factions. Each province is a loose collection of four cities, one of which is a capital with walls – which means outlying settlements can be attacked relatively easily, but a faction's home base must be besieged and worn down.

This aspect of Rome II plays out like Civilization-lite. The previous entry in the Total War series, Shogun II, streamlined its map micromanagement beautifully, but in Rome II there are countless new elements to consider, not all of which are welcome additions.

The colour palette for Rome II scales really badly. On the higher settings it looks outstanding, but as soon as you go lower all of the colour bleeds out. Photograph: Creative Assembly/Sega

Developing provinces is simple: build up a town's military capabilities and advanced troops can be recruited, or develop its farming and fishing infrastructure to increase your growing empire's food and resources. Alongside this you'll be researching new technologies to enhance your civil and military infrastructure, and this side of Rome II makes a lot of sense.

But there are further layers. Families within your provinces will cause problems, such as attempting to assassinate their rivals. Rebels will attack undefended towns. A dedicated fishing port might become so unpleasant a place to live that the peasants revolt.

All of these sound like interesting factors, but their implementation is poor. Take the rebel armies, for example. These spawn randomly and will fixate upon a town and attack it every turn, despite the garrison being easily able to hold them off. As your empire expands you'll be auto-resolving at least five or six of these battles every turn, where the opponent simply has no chance of winning. It's unnecessary busywork.

The real problem is that Rome II has mechanics that offer the illusion of depth, but come undone in practice. Levelling your armies is one of the worst culprits. Both generals and the troops they command will improve over time, becoming more battle-hardened in a manner of your choosing – calloused warriors, for example, or sly strategists. Watching your neophytes grow into a fearsome force is magical, and I grew remarkably attached to the Stantoninus legion. Then I made a mistake. I took on a fight I shouldn't have, deep in enemy territory, and my carefully husbanded army was almost entirely wiped out.

This should have been a devastating blow. But then the few survivors made it back to my territory and the army built itself up again, losing none of its experience or traits. The game should have punished me for such a foolish move, but instead after a few turns the dead had been replaced with soldiers of equal quality. So what is the point of this mechanic at all?

Rome II also has enormous issues with time management; specifically, it has no respect for yours. The gap between ending your turn and taking another is exceptionally long, and gets larger as you expose more of the map in each game. Rome II cycles through every single town that isn't under your control, even if you turn off the option to watch enemy moves, and you have no option but to twiddle your thumbs for 2 to 4 minutes every time and wait for things to resolve. This is especially egregious when consolidating positions – you want to take a few quickfire turns to finish some research, for example, or build your armies back up, but this will take 10 to 15 minutes of basically watching the game crunch numbers.

By far the worst manifestation of this is in the co-op campaign, a feature I'd been incredibly excited to try out with a fellow Total War nut. The gap between turns here is absolutely ruinous and makes this mode pointless – we soldiered through for about an hour in one game before giving up, decided to have another try after the day-one patch, and that time it crashed after a few turns. This was a headline feature of Rome II, but the implementation is a disaster. For every hour I've spent on this, I'd say about half that time was actually playing the thing.

Far more troublesome is the legion of technical issues. Frame-rate drops are a constant, and glitchy pathing behaviour is just a rule, but the performance was so bad I abandoned the review build supplied by Creative Assembly and downloaded the full game on release. It was just as terrible. My PC runs Shogun II at ultra settings without any issues but Rome II on medium makes it choke like a dog, and judging by the developer's own forum many others are having the same issues.

A standout feature is the ability to zoom right in from far above the battlefield to an up-close cinematic camera. Photograph: Creative Assembly/Sega

Which is why it's such a pity that, when you actually get into the battles and it's running smoothly for once, Rome II gives glimpses of a classic. It's easy to forget that the game's called Total War for a reason, and its gigantic throwdowns not only look the part but deliver substance, too. There's nothing like a late-game Roman army filled with mighty legionaries and cavalry, backed up by ballistae and naval support, crashing into a Carthaginian force of equal size and led by war elephants.

The detail up-close is extraordinary, but it's the ability to zoom far above the battlefield and command as a disembodied god that feels amazing. An especially nice new touch is an overhead tactical map that can toggled mid-battle, and switching between this to give orders and the up-close cinematic camera simply has no equivalent; it's a breathtaking sweep.

As with all Total War games the AI is questionable; though it feels generally improved from Shogun II, it's still possible to manipulate computer armies into chasing after one cavalry detachment, or flank opposing archers incredibly easily. There's also the odd detail that doesn't quite fit. I played as the Spartans, for example, and watched with incredulity as they were routed with ease in every battle. Minor as this may seem the Spartans, famously, did not back down – and certainly not after losing a few units.

It is in multiplayer that Rome II unambiguously shines. Playing against another human opponent is easily the most fun this has to offer, which is why it's such a pity the structure around fights is less advanced than that of Shogun II's clan system – the battles themselves are brilliant, but the lack of persistence is instantly noticeable. With that said the matchmaking does its job, and there is an enormous number of other players.

That can't save Rome II. Everything is contained in this single fact: my longest campaign, by far, was spent trying to take the Spartans to world domination. While checking a detail about the Spartan units, I realised that they're part of a DLC pack – that is, an extra purchase is required to use Greek factions. This game should never have been released in its current state, yet the makers have hived off "extra" content to be sold on the day of release.

Rome II feels like an unfinished game. It is a cruel fact that if you pick this up in a Steam sale in six months' time you'll get a much better experience, and the people who were foolish enough to put their faith and money upfront get the worst of it.

The developers behind Total War: Rome II clearly have enormous talent; but this game as a whole is a failure of project management. So many elements are polished to a shine and yet at no point do they even threaten to come together. And so Rome II comes to depend purely on its battles and the fumes of nostalgia from a game more than a decade old – an inspiration that, in all honesty, it is not fit to be compared to.

Rome: Total War is one of the most brilliant games I've ever played. Total War: Rome II inverts far more than the name. This does not channel the greatest military empire in history so much as the pale shadow of its ending; a bloated, technically corrupt and unfocused mess.