Gave it a shot today - although I did download the demo yesterday, I still ended up playing DR (the S1600 RX class is like crack to me).
Anyway, my initial impressions of the demo are mixed. While I really like how they've expanded on the customization part of the game, the game falls short on the sounds and the scrub system.
The sound department hasn't seen any improvements at all and the scrub system is basically almost the same as before, but now with a really unintuitive and awkward control scheme in my opinion. Pushing both analog sticks in different directions never made any sense to me while playing the demo. I really wish they would just let us control our scrubs and whips with the left analog stick. Slight improvements to the physics model seems to have been made but nothing of any major significance. Game seems to perform fine, but there are occasional dips below 30fps.
All in all, while I don't think it's a bad game, it's definitely not the sequel I wanted. I hoped for a far bigger leap in both sounds and the scrub system. Third time's the charm?