Introduction
A reasonably creative re-imaginating of the original. You control a young horse commander and 5 squads of varying combat orientation. For mission deployment you are limited to your commander and 3 of the squads. There is close to no base building involved in either the campaign or skirmish modes.
Gameplay
In DOW2 there are two main game modes. Campaign and Skirmish. Campaign pits your small space marine horse against increasingly powerful and numerically superior horses and require you, at least on the games harder modes (of which primarch is the hardest) to use terrain and tactics to succed. Simply trying to throw your horses at the enemy head-on will usually result in swift and fairly rapid failure.
During the course of the campaign your squads will level up, allowing you to upgrade their health levels, melee damage, ranged damage and energy reserves as well as unlocking new traits and abilities along the way. You also loot better weapons from enemies that wind up dead, along with recieving better armour and weapons from mission rewards and mission triggered events.
Skirmish plays completly differently. You start the match with one commander that you've already chosen from any of the 4 armies in the game (space marines, eldar, orks and tyranids) along with a basic unit and a HQ building. From here it's you and your teams job to capture and hold strategic objectives as well as requisition points and power nodes. The tech tree is basic and easy to understand. Your one building has three levels, each unlocks by spending resources and grants you more powerful units. Requisition and power points are also shared by all 3 players, so if your ally captures 3 requisition points and a power generator while your defending the place, you gain the bonus from those buildings as well.
In the course of combat you will also gain a secondary resource that allows you access to things like terminators, orbital strikes, eldritch storms, waaagh abilities, and so on. Some of these abilities are generic to the army (like terminators and eldritch storms), others are specific to your chosen commander (Tech marines can use a special ability to repair vehicles).
Lastly there are a variety of upgrades available for your commander and squads. Those are chosen on a squad by squad basis instead of more general upgrades. Squads have 3-4 upgrades available, where commanders 9, of which they can choose 3.
Sights and Sounds
I've only played the game on normal settings, but the effects with just those settings are pretty nice. Orbital strikes look heavily destructive, although slightly less impressive than in the original for other reasons. Heavy firefights sounds pretty decent and some of the lines the squads and commanders come out with (or hisses and screams in the tyranids case) are believable enough for me.
Stuff that sucks
The campaign only has 12 or so maps, and you'll play most of them 3-4 times easily before you finish. Now personally, that doesn't bother me. I learn the best ways to assault the map and get better ratings because of it, but I have seen more than a couple of people complain because they got bored of fighting in the same places.
The matching system is also fairly rubbish. I've had it happen where I'm sat there for 10-15 minutes waiting for the system to find me 5 people to fight against, and on a weekend I just can't believe that's from a lack of players.
Conclusion
I enjoyed playing it when the beta was released, I've enjoyed playing the campaign through twice, and I find the multiplayer fairly well balanced, but if you're into games that aren't always going to last less than 10 minutes the skirmish mode might put you off. When playing with 2 friends (maps max out at 6 players, 3 a side) we have had games where we steamroll the other players so hard that we've won in under 5 minutes. With no base to turtle in your only option to to play extremly offensivly right from the word go and not everyone is into that.
Generally though skirmish is great fun, and I enjoyed the campaign story enough to play through it twice, although partly this was just to test alternative tactics regarding my squads traits and equipment. There should be an expansion pack comming down the pipe, and on the quality of DOW2 I'll easily buy it.
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