Forumites, could somebody who pre-ordered give us a review of the demo? Pretty please?
ok, first and foremost: if you're waiting for the business aspect, then there is nothing for you in the demo (except costs, maybe, and tech level)
about the demo... the engine simulation is pretty convincing. I don't know what you'd want to know from this demo, but I see lot of commitment in making all the small details working together.
technology is mostly based on the 'year' concept; from what I see, each tech comes at a year but the actual year is not an hard limit: it drives costs up and down when using future/past teches or old/new manufacturing plants
the various scenario range from easy and fun to frustratingly impossible; they show a lot of the feature of the engine, but the one that probably are going to be the most used to make decision are smoothness, responsiveness, economy and mean time failure (in megarevs): it seems that their correlation with the engine is pretty solid and if buyers are going to evaluate cars on those parameters, then the game is going to be quite solid.
however, I think that unless you know at least a bit of engines, you're going to have an hard time tuning power, duration and consumption. I wonder how much time in the end game will be passed in the engine designer and how much is going to be spent planning and expanding your business. (but I think I saw you in the aurora thread so I'm sure you'll not be daunted by the complexity)