A little rough around the edges, but it closes the book on the original Dawn of War with dignity.
As is Dawn of War's tradition, the game's campaign is bad... very bad. It's essentially a redo of Dark Crusade's meta map campaign, except with less story, which I didn't think was possible. Really, Relic and Iron Lore should have been more like Petroglyph, or EA and made a meta map mode a secondary game type, and made the campaign a linear story similar to the original Dawn of War, and its first expansion Winter Assault because that way everyone wins.
Like Dark Crusade, Soulstorm introduces two new factions bringing the selection up to nine out W40K's eleven primary factions. First you've got the "nuns with guns" Sisters of Battle who fight the enemies of the Imperium regularly, especially Chaos. Second you've got the Dark Eldar, sadistic, and twisted versions of the Eldar (space elves) from the original Dawn of War... you can essentially refer to them as Drow in space because that's really what they are. Both new factions fit in quite well with the past seven, and the past factions have been tweaked making Soulstorm's launch version perhaps the most balanced edition of Dawn of War to date.
Along with the new factions every existing army has been granted a new type of unit, air units. Unfortunately the air units are, as I feared, poorly implemented. The air units constantly hover similar to the air units of Starcraft, and the clunky animation and movement doesn't help since when they move they constantly stop and restart their engines. To top it off, air units do little to no damage, and can be taken down by any ranged units making them seem like unnecessary additions; they're quite useless if nothing else.
Visually Dawn of War is showing its age. Despite some tweaks to the older factions, and the new factions being consistently solid in quality; Dawn of War's low resolution textures on units, and terrain make it feel somewhat sub-par when compared to more recent releases. While I think that "fullres_teamcolour" is enabled by default, I added it into my local.ini file, anyway; and noticed a slight increase in the quality of the unit textures. Audio wise, there's nothing really new except the new music themes for the Sisters of Battle, and Dark Eldar, plus the voice acting for both factions which is actually fairly good.
I'm somewhat torn with Dawn of War: Soulstorm. I enjoy the new factions, but the campaign is poor, and the $40 USD price tag seemed a little high considering that Winter Assault, and Dark Crusade were only $30 USD. Still, if you enjoyed Dawn of War then it's perhaps worth checking out once the price drops, and a patch is released. If you haven't played the addictive Dawn of War what the hell are you waiting for?