I love, love, love me some DOW2.  And after spending most of the day with the single player campaign in retribution, I kinda just want to go back and play the old stuff and forget this exists.  It doesn't play anything like the original/Chaos Rising.  It's like they took the single player aspects and tried to mash in the multi-player unit requisition mechanics.  Actually it's not that it's like that, it's exactly that.  And it's just not good.  Hope springs eternal, and I'm gonna keep going with it but it just really feels less like a new expansion and more like an experimental mod that doesn't really work.

Yeah, IGN's review said that the SP wasn't as good as the previous... but what can Relic do? No-one can make good SP for 6 races. I'm buying it only for the multiplayer( steam and new match-making sys) but I'll finish the SP with all races...

I started up an Imperial Guard single player game and I like it so far.  It's a bit different than DoW2 and Chaos Rising but definitely likable IMHO.   

The two hours I got to play before Steam revoked the game again... *grumble* ...was pure fun. Different, yes, but not bad. I bought it only for the SP campaign and I'm not disappointed at the changes. Can't wait to try out the other races later on.

My disappointment stems from the attempts to merge the multiplayer components of unit requisition into the SP campaign.  (Which is, to be honest the only part I'm really interested in)  I'm not against change, but this feels halfbaked.  The core concept of the original and CR was the use of small squads and there sergeants.  You never had more than four squads on the field and they all played a very distinct role.  That's mostly either gone or minimized in what seems like an attempt to make it play a little bit more like a standard base building style RTS, in a game that really wasn't built to do that. 
 
@borodin: The structure mostly remains unchanged as you'll still find yourself spending skill points and equipping gear, then choosing a mission, etc, etc.  The leveling systems a little different and while I don't love it I don't actively dislike it either.  All in all the structure remains basically the same, I just think the actual gameplay has been altered to the games detriment.  And since they went from GFW to Steam there's no importing of save files.  So instead of playing as your force commander on the BA's campaign you play as Diomadies from the end of CR.  The sergeants show up here and there but their back to being starter level so you have to buy their powers all over again.  It's not the end of the world it's just kinda jarring and inelegant.   
 
@phrosnite: No matter how hard or how often I try I just can't wrap my head around the multiplayer.  I get owned every damn time.

Multiplayer is better than ever, that's all I care about. Single player's okay too, for what it's worth, playing it through on Very Hard and it's somewhat of a breeze. 

" @Geno: ...You wanna play some MP? "

My IG campaign was using the bonus items I received with preorder on normal and it was super easy to complete.  I'll have to see if that hold true for the other campaigns. 
 
To a certain degree I wonder if the easy difficulty was intentional to give people an easy way to familiarize themselves with the various factions for multiplayer.   
 
In any case I like it.

I'm really not feeling the SP the same way I did with the previous two games. The story is pretty loose, you don't have much attachment to the characters even though 2 of them are from the previous game, I played the Space Marine campaign first. There isn't really much tactics in SP anymore, before you had to conserve your tactical items but now they are all energy so you can just wait 30 seconds and use it again. Towards the end of the campaign I just found myself walking this big ball of death around the map steamrollering it all. I played on hard and didn't even come close to dying in any mission.  
 
I played a bit of MP and Last Stand but not enough for it to make up for the lack of SP.  Maybe I just had too high hopes after the first two games...