Whilst Dawn of War 2's myriad Single-Player campaigns and Last Stand mode are generally-beloved by the playerbase, for their plot and characterization, and Last Stand's raw fun-factor, the same cannot be said of Dawn of War 2's multiplayer, which is horribly reviled by much of the playerbase for being both counter-intuitive, non-interactive, and poorly-designed. Boasting a general setup virtually identical to Relic's World War II RTS Company of Heroes, Dawn of War II's multiplayer starts off strong - multiple heroes, and some (apparent) real tactical choices for each faction - and quickly slides downhill.

The central mechanic of Dawn of War 2 is capturing points, much as was the case in its predecessor. Unlike the original, however, Dawn of War 2's smaller scale and extremely slow econ-building means that the bulk of Dawn of War 2 is focused around a much smaller group of units - and these magic buttons, once taken, cannot be reinforced or made harder to take by building structures or guns on it, like Dawn of War 1 - and worse, with most defense structures costing population and resources in a game with few to spare, you cannot afford to use these on any but the most-critical of the magic buttons: the Victory Points. This frequently means that games between newbies to DOW2 frequently turn into merry-go-round battles as everyone tries to take everyone else's magic buttons, only to lose theirs and need to capture it again. The comp opponents, even on the hardest difficulties, are well-known for being willing to foster this behavior, and will sooner die than allow a magic button to go un-humped.

One might think that this metagame design means that securing and holding terrain would be of critical importance, something that was true in the Tabletop 40K game for Table Quarters or Objective games. If this is what you thought, then you thought like an idiot, because if you don't keep your units grouped for maximum firepower, you can expect to lose them in short order - and with their expense and time involved replacing them, you cannot afford to lose them. Because of this, scouting, securing better terrain, and pretty much all else fall secondary to getting a big ol' cluster of early game units, moving for the magic button closest to the enemy, and (hopefully) killing their force group, ergo putting them in an utterly-unrecoverable-from situation where you already hold most of the map and they can do nothing but watch their tickets slowly bleed away. Most games of Dawn of War 2's multiplayer decisively end in about 4 minutes specifically because of this gameplay mechanic. Because of the entire metagame slowly pulling itself into this bizarre paradigm, DOW2's Multiplayer comes across as remarkably one-dimensional, since it's rare that high-level games make it beyond Tier 2 - they turn into complete curb-stomps. The ones that don't quickly devolve into the Merry-Go-Round.

Special note needs to be made for the Retreat mechanic. Intended to allow players who are risking losing units to remove them from battle so they can recover back at base, it's an incredibly finicky mechanic that happens to grossly benefit a certain faction that can move faster than most and is nigh-impossible for slower and larger commanders to get much use out of if they really start getting pounded. In practice, it just slows down a game which already has a painfully poor pace. With every game de-volving into either a curb-stomp or the merry-go-round, the Retreat mechanic is only one more bit of strangeness further diluting a game whose mechanics already defy comprehension.

To further drive home how bad this game's general premise is, the central focus of the metagame is not 1v1s, but, in fact, 3v3 team battles. This setup has allowed the devs to get incredibly lazy with setups, since no race actually needs to be self-sufficient in a strategy game where this sort of thing is supposed to be a critical element.