Alright, played the demo for about 10 times, unlocked son of sparda mode, got an S on the first level(that goddamn time requirement is strict), first impressions incoming.
-Jumping is still the most practical way of dodging things, essentially with the super long air dash you can easily get out of trouble.
-The lock-on system is gone, I find this to be bullshit because it severely limits the moveset (I'm not talking about X, X, pause, X kind of moves, those are easy to implement and not practical in higher difficulties anyway) and auto-target takes the player's control away from the game. Doing a stinger becomes a serious pain. But I eventually got used to it and understand it needs to accommodate the angel/demon weapons
-The angel/demon weapon is an...interesting idea, I really like it actually, it replaces weapon switch as far as I can tell. As much as I love the old weapon switch system, I also welcome new ideas. But there needs to be more angel/demon weapons if they want to make this work, I'm not sure if different primary weapon + the same angel/demon weapon for the whole game is enough variety for my taste, but then again I managed to endure Nero so who knows.
-The parry system feels busted since it's essentially just clashing with an enemy attack, this makes parrying mid-combo very unreliable. And there's very little payoff in parrying so you might as well just attack it instead, except for the boss who is extremely vulnerable to parrying.
-The control can get a bit wonky at times, there might be a slight input delay when using the angel/demon chain where if you press X at the same time as RT, Dante will shoot instead of using the chain. Or maybe it's just my problem. The inputs have a longer input buffer than previous games, but only slightly, it discourages players from mashing so that's always a good thing.
-The double jump doesn't have the cool glyph effect anymore, DMC used to have my favorite double jump effect ever, now there's no effect at all.
-No taunt, fucking unacceptable.
-The tortured soul things are there purely for completion purposes (they give a negligible amount of red orbs), not a fan of that.
Ok so that's a lot of negative points but that's because I really like the series so I'm very critical of it, don't worry. The rest of the game is really good. The demo is very well made and shows off every aspect of the game, I'm not necessarily amazed by it but it's definitely good. The last deciding factor for me is whether there are different angel/demon weapons. If there is, instant buy, if not, I'll remain undecided.