A complete review of Empire: Total War

So my last two posts have dabbled in Empire: Total War, even giving them a score, but neither of them was a true review. Rather than write out a large article I'm going to attempt to bullet and summarize points.

Campaign Map -
1. Very fun. This has always been the selling point for me with Total War games, granted I've only ever played Medieval: Total War before. Not even the 2nd one, because it ran so horribly when I demo'd it that I decided I wouldn't buy it. Turn based strategy empire building sim, great.
2. Very buggy. The gaming industry seems to have fallen into a problem. "It's okay to ship something with a few pieces broken, because we can patch it later." What they seem to forget over and over is that you can't just patch something later, not without testing it, not without running into unexpected bugs that require yet another patch, and another, because you keep breaking things every time you try to fix them. No, E:TW will Never be a good game. It was shipped still as a piece of crap, it will forever be a piece of crap. The amount of bugs is horrendous. Even after 4 or 5 patches. Game companies wonder why people don't spend money on their games? This is one of the reasons. I will never buy another Total War game again after this one. All the reviews you might read on gaming sites? Pure crap. If you want to know about E:TW, then go to google, type in Empire: Total War forums, and go to them. Players still manage to have fun, but if you go to the bugs section, or even the game play section, all that's discussed is bug after bug after bug.
3. Mods. Apparently E:TW wasn't expected to be a finished product by many people anyway. The number of mods available that tweak AI, tweak unit numbers and length of the campaign, are all out there. You would think that these bug and balance fixes wouldn't be necessary since they had QA test it, but apparently Sega can't manage that.
4. Sound - Decent, but quickly dull. Sound hiccups when you pause then resume battles. As in, you get a really loud burst of sound for no reason.
5. Sea battles - Gimmick. A huge, worthless, gimmick. Then again, I'd prefer if the battles weren't in real time but turn based.

Overall? DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. Not for another 6 months at least. I would return it, except I lost my receipt :( This is a bad, bad, bad game. Rating: 3/10. Is it Total War? Yes. Is it worth it? No. Go pick up Medieval: Total War, and play a quality game. Not M:TW 2, that one was bad, get the first one. Then you can enjoy what a TW game should be. E:TW is just... it is just bad. It is an unfinished product, lacking any sort of polish, it's like the Age of Conan of... whatever genre it is. Seriously, it is just like Age of Conan was.

Edit: Well I suggest not buying it anyway, because I don't really enjoy it as a purchase. If you love Total War, you might want to buy the game, but if you're new to the series you probably won't enjoy it as much if you haven't played any other games in the series.