More of the same with a lot less polish.
The first expansion, Chaos Rising, I felt was a moderate improvement to the game. It added a new and interesting faction, the single player campaign, while still inane, was a lot more interesting and the multiplayer was more or less the same.
With Retribution, I don't feel like anything worthwhile was added. Rather than having only 1 single player campaign with 1 race, Retribution allows 6 campaigns with 6 different races. That sounds great on paper, and harks back to the excellent single player gameplay of Dark Crusade, but each campaign is so washed down and boring that it's barely even worth it. There's very little to differentiate the campaigns from one another and they're just husks of what was a pretty boring and lousy campaign in the original DoW 2.
I can't really imagine a 40k game without the Imperial Guard, which was added in this game, but the small scale tactical combat just doesn't seem to really work with the IG squads. The whole concept of the IG is to beat enemies down with overwhelming numbers and heavy equipment. Innumerable guardsmen, pounding artillery and walls of tanks are how they claim victory. Because of how few units you're able to build/control in DoW2, IG never really 'feels' right. Running around with a couple squads of squishy infantry and a tank doesn't feel any different that playing with the eldar or the Space Marines. It's all the same and it's really kills the point of having 6 races in the game.
I had a good amount of enjoyment with Dawn of War 2 altogether, but not nearly as much as Dawn of War 1 and other Relic titles. Dawn of War 2 just doesn't seem well designed overall. Company of Heroes got it right. Dawn of War 2 just seems like a bastardization of CoH and DoW1 that lost a lot in mix. It's not a bad game, but it's not something that will keep me occupied forever like DoW1 did.