No more workers, no base building: this game is definitely very much different from the original DoW and really resembles the tabletop game from which the franchise was born. I actually liked the new combat system, the unit upgrades and the graphics are nice as well.
I usually play for Eldar because I don't really dig the whole huge army thing. There seems to be some balance issues at this stage. The units are divided in three tiers but there's not much point in upgrading, because (for Eldar at least) the last tier units, well, they suck. Why should I spend an outrageous amount of money on some huge tank which can be easily destroyed by a simple first-tier unit squad before it can actually fire? The Avatar is looking cool but is he THAT slow? The only good thing about him is his abilities which are on a really long cooldown as well. For the same amount of money you can get three Tier 2 Wraithlords who are ridiculously tough, versatile (you can upgrade either to destroy vehicles or to destroy infantry) and get a health regeneration spell at Tier 3. I actually pulled off an insane amount of victories by only using only a combination of these guys.
Another bizarre thing is the resource system. The energy is now also obtained through capturing and upgrading points instead of building the generators across the map which is a nice idea. The requisition points on the other hand can't be upgraded and provide so little income compared to the initial amount that there's little point in capturing any.
As there's no more stationary defenses apart from the main base, another issue is the point control. It's one thing to have a tactical game, but here it always ends up in a huge mess. Every single infantry unit can capture a point in a matter of seconds, the same works for heroes. There fore it's just way too easy for a single unit to get to the far side of the map and recapture all the enemy points, so that the game becomes more of a dance around the battlefield rather than actual fighting.
And here lies a big problem: there's not much BATTLE in DoW2. The tabletop game is all about the skirmish but here, it's just a frenetic race for resources and victory points. There is no actual battlefront, so that the whole tactical approach goes to hell as there's no way to efficiently protect the fragile powerful units, as the enemy can come from everywhere (that's another reason why last tier units like tanks are so useless). This game has potential but it needs a little more time to take care of these issues most of which can't be dealt with by a simple patch.
The main problem unfortunately is the gameplay which was really promising in the beginning, but in the end there was not one battle where I actually felt in control of the game. It seems that with Starcraft 2 being not far away from being released the developers rushed out the game which is a shame because compared to the Blizzard game, Dow2 has some nice innovative ideas that can go to waste should the game remain such a mess.