Recent reviews by Gallen_Dugall

TLDR not worth it for even $10
Lots of traditional Paradox style busy work with a Roman overlay.
Peace is a boring tedious grind
Wars are a completion bar filling up
Game play loop is unsatisfying

Gives you the option to have a Rome where women have all the rights of men. I bring this up because adding this worthless alternate reality option no one wants means other options could not be implemented. It should have been left to modders, but no, the devs considered this a critical feature.

Total War Rome II and Rome Total War both did Rome better with the original being the more fun of the two.

This content is bonus

Three fun classic tables from the '80s.
Banzai Run has the gimmick of a very fast playing, remarkably easy to get to, vertical second table instead of the normal advertising and score area.
Black Knight 2000 (sequel to the popular Black Knight table) with truly one of the best sound and light designs in pinball history. Just beautiful on every level. Worth the price of purchase on its own.
Earthshaker is a solid, very playable, entry to fill out the set.
All three have a third flipper in the upper play field with Banzai Run duplicating that in its upper vertical table.

requires a game controller to play
no option for mouse and keyboard
refunded

This game is unfinished and will never be finished. Needs about 3 balance patches and 12 DLC to make it complete.
Even then it is very boring and very slow. A slower and more boring version of Stellaris.

UPDATE Microsoft is REFUSING TO PROVIDE REFUNDS! Refund was approved by Steam and Microsoft is refusing to honor it.
This is a grossly unfinished product the publisher is throttling access to.
You buy it, you install it, and you have a splash screen. That's it.
After a day of this I refunded, but some people were lucky enough to play a glitchy, unfinished product with missing components.
This is the same thing they did with the 40th anniversary product and it was only ready for purchase a year later. Do yourself a favor, avoid being a beta tester, and wait until this goes on deep sale.

I like this one. The Grand Archive catalogs all those exploration pop ups I've been reflexively closing for the past few years without ever looking at them. Now you've got an archive of stuff you can browse through and it tells you where it came from and provides tiny bonuses. Or you can sell them. Plus it cleans up the relics and unifies with the astral realms stuff so it all feels more cohesive. Breeding space fauna was already in the game with mods and this is very similar to that with a bit more polish and balance as they are not a game dominating force but are fun to play around with. The two new origins are fun one shots with one being good for any generic "predator" species. The new mini crises are fun events. So yes, I recommend this one. Hardly "must have DLC" but very nice. Your take on the price may vary.
Not much more to say beyond it being refreshing not having the devs trying to normalize psychopathic behavior in Stellaris DLC.

POST ENDGAME COMMENTS
Original review below stands.
30ish hours of linear single player story. A rather cartoonish story, but that's lore accurate to the Honor! Warrior! Honor! nonsense that is the Clans. I've never liked the Clans and I still can't see Clanners as people, their culture is unworkably nonsensical, but for lore accuracy this is a fun experience.
Biggest disappointment is you don't get to fight alongside or against Elementals (the Clan power armor). People talk about them and they show up in cut scenes but that is it.
Biggest problem I had was Omnipods. You earn Mech XP with each chassis when you or one of you minions takes it out on a mission. These can be spent on upgrades to chassis maneuverability or omnipods that give you different hardpoint options, and this is not documented at all and I couldn't figure out why I could not buy any omnipods many missions in. Even then you don't get enough Mech XP to experiment with builds for every chassis - I guess that's replayability.
Research unlocks improved weapons and armor, and to do research you need salvage. So pouring everything into upgrading salvage early on is vital if you want to put a dent into the research tree.
Kerensky's, the currency for buying mechs and equipment, are insanely plentiful. Hitting the 20mil achievement is unavoidable. Never felt a pinch there and wish there was something to waste them on. Being able to buy the all important salvage for example.
For the most lore accurate experience I recommend playing on "story" with aim assist turned on and maxed out - you are supposed to be a superhuman genetically engineered Clanner after all.
ORIGINAL
Huge reservations about recommending this product. I strongly do not recommend the digital edition as the content is only usable in the game so you cannot listen to the soundtrack or look at the art without running the game. A strike against the base game is that this is not a finished product as DLC and patches will eventually provide a much more complete product - that's just the way the industry is. If you are willing to invest now and hope it gets enough love from the dev team that this will be a good product then buy. If you are willing to wait a couple of years you can get a more complete game for less money. Right now it is okay. You get a very "on rails" story where you play as naive recruits for Team Baddie and that's fun for a single play through which is the problem with playing as any soldier in an army where you are just following orders. Gameplay is slightly more arcadey than Mercs and the story is full of cartoonish characters which fits because Battletech increasingly leaned towards the cartoonish once the Clans showed up.

This does not give you the game soundtrack. You can only listen to the music in game. Makes this a worthless purchase.

So unexcited for this DLC, even though I have it all loaded up, I can't be bothered to even look at it, but yeah, gets a recommend sight unseen. If you've got the base game that you haven't refunded then you might as well get this. A big whatever. Gonna go play Cyberpunk 2077.
EDIT OMG I played it.
So basically the mysterious faction is in trouble and you have to save them, and also join their "pretending technology is magic" cult so they'll let you save them, and just get used to being treated like filth for trying to help them... it's a lot of running around doing puzzle quests. Some light combat. You can explore their thriving capital city with some fifty citizens some of who shout quests at you as you run back and forth following the quest objective marker.
Original review stands.
Uninstalling this thing.