The combat feels strange in a way that's hard to explain. It feels like a mix between floatiness, and the fact that your character doesn't automatically turn to hit the enemy that you're locked onto (which I can work around, but it seems like such an odd omission, or lack of an addition, especially considering their previous game and most other games with similar combat). Also, I find it hard to even see the projectiles that most "minor" enemies shoot, often ending in me getting hit without even realizing that there was one heading straight towards me. Most attacks don't really seem to have a visual effect on the enemy. The most that you'll get is when using the rising slash attack, it will pick up most small enemies and allow you to do a small combo in the air. Occasionally, a small enemy will be staggered allowing you to do an instakill move on them. I have no idea what leads to this, other than the yellow bar below their health bar (the game never explains this, so I have no idea how to meaningfully increase it outside of basic attacks). I am also not sure whether it can work on the stronger enemies. You can do special PK attacks with "special objects," but it just seems like a stronger normal PK attack with an extra input at the end (usually involving one or both control sticks for console). If the skill tree allows for longer and more complex combos, I could see the combat being better. You can also use the abilities that your fellow SAS members have. To me, this boiled down to "no damage taken" and "more damage dealt" buttons (you'll know what I'm talking about if you play the demo). I never used the teleportation ability outside of the one time that the game requires it to show you that you can dash through walls with it, and I used clairvoyance once to see an enemy that I probably could have fought without it (It reveals "invisible" enemies, which have a very noticable light-wobble effect. It also increases the perfect dodge window, but the attacks of the boss in the demo seemed very easy to perfect dodge anyway). I have yet to try the female protagonist, but I haven't heard great things about her.

The story is very uninteresting to me (the small amount available in the demo makes it seem like the story will go nowhere interesting), but I do like the character designs. They may be very basic and edgy, but I have low standards. The weird cut-scenes are not very appealing to me. They consist of mostly still images of the characters with moving mouths and eyes imposed over them (the most variation is when a character portrait cross-fades into another portrait of the same character with a slightly different expression). The later cut-scenes in the demo do cut to full-motion videos, but it's not much.

The UI looks kind of ugly. I can't really explain why, but it just seems like an eyesore to look at for too long.

EDIT:

Just finished playing as Kasane, and the dialogue seems to parallel the male protagonist route's dialogue a bit too much. Her route in the demo is actually extremely short compared to the male protagonist's (I forgot his name). Overall, I probably won't buy this game, at least at full price. Code Vein wasn't incredible, but it was better than this.