I'm up to mission 12 on the campaign doing a hard difficulty run, and I have to admit, I'm actually enjoying myself far more than I expected given the lukewarm reviews. It's nothing spectacular, mind you, and I definitely feel the loss with the lack of wargear customization and the like, but the actual gameplay is involved enough that I'm not really getting bored. Even the downtime when I'm waiting for my elites to heal and squads to reinforce is useful for providing me with time to plan my next moves.
The balance, however, definitely feels kind of off right now. I'm having an easier time with the orks than the other two factions. Killa Kans in particular are just outrageously strong for their cost. HUGE burst damage capable of instagibbing whole squads, and their attacks are true damage, to boot. I haven't seen any unit as effective in the other factions.
I should mention that I actually appreciate the campaign jumping between factions so much. As nice as it was to get really deep in with the characterization and lore of the space marines during DoW 2, I really just prefer switching things up like this. I still think they should be giving us more customization and progression, but, again, I'm having enough fun with the moment-to-moment gameplay that I can't really hold it against them.
All that said... the multiplayer content is absolutely anemic. Only two 2v2 maps and three 3v3 maps (I'm ignoring 1v1 atm) is a bloody terrible joke. I don't think I've ever seen an RTS release with such sparse content. If their intent was to ape MOBAs with a few (or only one) map(s) that put the focus on the encounters, I can kind of understand that... but this is an RTS. And, well, with Heroes of the Storm having as many maps as it does, even that excuse is kind of lame when you look at the competition.
They've also tried too damn hard to force troop vs troop encounters. Excising defensive structures entirely (listening posts aside, and those guns are weak enough to be ignored) is a terrible move, especially since it means there's no bulwark to fall back to to try to hold out against a stronger enemy when you fall behind. Taking out unit leveling helps to prevent snowballing, but build times and unit costs are simply too high to recover from heavy losses. Once again we're looking at a game where you pretty much know when you have to surrender because there's no coming back.
That plus no Last Stand mode (or some superior equivalent) means I'm glad I bought the game at a fairly steep discount. There's no way I'd consider it worth a full $60. It's not surprising at all that the reception by the players is "mixed" at best. They cut out too much from the previous games to focus so much on the gameplay, and the gameplay is not engaging enough to make up for all the things they dropped from the previous games. The DLC is gonna have its work cut out for it if they want the game to have a healthy player base.