I've played everything the demo offers now, and I just cannot over HOW GOOD THIS GAME IS.
You get three parts of the game to try:
Campaign (Black): You play as Jack, the main character from Madworld on Wii and fight a boss battle. Has some story.
Campaign (White): You play as Leo (who looks a bit like Raiden from MGS and the main character from the shitty game Nanobreaker combined) and run around a portion of a level. This is free-roaming and there's an endless supply of enemy characters to beat up. Mission starts points are in various areas around the stage. I found three; not sure if there's any others. The last mission is another boss battle.
Multiplayer: This is online (or you can just play offline with bots) and is restricted to team deathmatch, with four players on each side. And this is where the game is NUTS. You run around a a ruined city and try to kill as many of the enemy team as possible. Items to use (like tires and street signs, just like in Madworld), health, and weapons are scattered around. There's also stage hazards that can occur. So far I have seen bombers fly by and carpet-bomb the shit out of everything, poison gas that fills up the lower levels of the map (drains your health; you have to run to higher ground), Cthulu (not the Lovecraft monster, but instead a HUGE mech that annihilates everything in its path), runaway vehicles crashing and exploding, and an NPC pulling a level, which detonates a ton of bombs and causes the buildings in the stage to collapse, altering the map!
Controls are tight and allow you to do light and hard attacks, lock onto enemy targets, dodge, block/counter, use a character-specific weapon (which has its own meter; it drains with use and fills up automatically when you stop using it), and like in the campaign, you find weapons and various items to use. You can also grapple characters who are both standing and already-downed for additional damage.
I think this is the best 3D beat-em-up (done in the more traditional Final Fight or Streets Of Rage vein) that I ever played. Platinum just nailed it and the multiplayer being good is just the icing on the cake.
Note that you will need to check the options (all in Japanese) to change the language. You can switch everything, except for the options menu itself, to English.
