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TLDR

This game brings AoE:DE to AoE2:DE’s game engine, but fails to bring half of the quality of life features that AoE2:DE has into this game mode.
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This is an update to AOE:DE, but it still manages to miss some of the most important features which are available in AoE2:DE and AoE3:DE, these features being ranked matchmaking and Art of war missions (advanced tutorials).
I only played the Return of Rome portion of this game, so I’m going to review this dlc as an update to AoE:DE (everything that AoE2:DE has but AoE:DE doesn’t have is considered a new feature).

Positives

This game has replays which work with the Capture Age, allowing a great spectator experience for tournaments/streaming. The Capture Age is also a great tool to help you get better in this game.
There are new interesting map scripts available.

Negatives

This game doesn’t have ranked matchmaking (it only has lobbies).
With no matchmaking the 1v1 ladder is close to a useless since players can always choose who they play against making the rank far less meaningful than it would be if the player couldn’t pick specific players and maps to play with.
Matchmaking makes it also easier to play a multiplayer games which would increase the multiplayer population.
There are no tutorials
In AoE2:DE and AoE3:DE there is a bunch of good tutorials explaining the basic strategies and how the games economy and units work.
These tutorials allow everyone to prepare for multiplayer games making the games more balanced which in turn makes the experience better for all players.

Subjective matters

Whereas I try to be as objective as possible, the following features are still subjective matters and some people will not agree as to which features are upgrades and which features are downgrades.
Maps
Good
Return of Rome increased the number of map scripts (11 -> 28) giving wider variety of environments to play in.

Now this game has team island (Ocean Channel).
There are maps with pre walled bases making an interesting late game scenarios.
Mega Random: A highly randomized map with all kinds of wacky starts. Including explorers and other additional starting units.
Nomad: rather than a starting setting with just a single villager, now there are maps which have nomad start with multiple villagers and more starting resources, making the Nomad more exiting game style.
Inland script is now improved and the fish count is more even than it was in AoE:DE where one team could have had all the deep fish.

Bad
(Most of) the map scripts are sorta broken. The neutral food is always located at the middle of the map. The corners of the maps are pretty much always barren (Only wood lines). The only food the map corners can have is fish.
The extreme differences that made AoE:DE and AoE maps so great are now mostly removed.
Oasis used to be very aggressive map with small wood lines and a small(ish) circle of wood in the middle. This map is now filled with wood making it easy to wall around your starting base, and the map contains more than enough wood to create a massive Iron Age Army without ever needing to migrate into the middle of the map.
Heavy water maps (Small island, Large Island, Narrows) use to have random island locations, but now in Return of Rome the islands are always placed as a pizza slices making them very predictable maps to play.
Rivers: In AoE:DE Rivers is a really slow map with no deep fish or any good fishing (making more than 10 fishing ships is waste of wood). Now in Return of Rome this map has much more fish; making it play out like a inland map with rivers variation (water control is now also a big economy boost.).
Mediterranean has multiple elephants in AoE:DE making both water and land strategies viable. In Return of Rome there are so few elephants that the water boom play style is going to be almost always a better strategy than full land aggression, which reduces the strategic depth.
Civilization balance
TLDR; The strongest civilizations got even stronger on the things they were already good at while all the weakest civilizations stayed weak.
Game balance is always going to be an issue but this game has some big problems in they way the civilization balance is done.
One example is the water balance. In AoE:DE there is two civilization (Minoan & Yamato) which are above everyone else in terms of water strength. These civilizations bonuses being; cheaper ships (-30% cost) & extra hit points (+20% HP) on all ship.
Rather than giving water bonuses for all other civilizations to make the water gameplay more balanced, this game (Return of Rome) buffed these two civilizations water strength by giving them even more bonuses on water; making the already bad water balance even worse.
And it is close to a same thing on land maps.
One of the strongest (top 3) civilizations on land maps in AoE:DE is Shang (villagers cost -20%), and in Return of Rome Shang got the strongest team bonus by far (Town centers give +4 headroom ). Previously having Shang on your team was a small advantage, but now it is a big bonus all across the playing field, which makes Shang the best land civilization in this game for 1v1, and in team games the Shang is two steps above every other civilization.
This game revolves heavily around Tool Age fights and in order to make the civilizations balanced all civilizations should have decent/good Tool age bonuses, but as was in the AoE:DE and still continues to be in Return of Rome the weakest civilizations have no Tool Age bonuses making them weak to play whenever you end up as them in a flank position or in a 1v1 game.
General game Balance
TLDR; Some improvement were done (with success) to balance out the units, but the same major problems which were present in the AoE:DE are still present in Return of Rome.
The Scout rushes continues to be a same type of coin flip as they were in AoE:DE.
One of the two things happen in a Scout rush ~90% of the time: Either the rusher gets into the enemy base before walls are up and kills most of the villagers (> 80%), or the defender get walls up in time and the rushes gets nothing done.
This is not about Scouts being too strong or too weak but rather about how little interaction there is and how small of a window there is to do something.
In Return of Rome the defender can salvage the situation better (with garrisoning villagers) than they could in AoE:DE, but the problem still remains largely the same: The game is over in a very short window of time and more often than not luck is a big part of the outcome (blind rush + how easily the defender can wall up their base).
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Formations, gates, garrisoning and land trade do change the game, but these are not all that interesting features.
The general game balance is a bit whacked, but that shouldn't be a surprise. The rest of the balance issues can be corrected with simple number changes.