GOWs combat is incredibly shallow compared to DMC, DMC has advanced mechanics like on the fly weapon swapping, multiple styles, and by DMC4, on the fly style swapping, DMC3 has 5 devil arms and 5 fire arms each with a massive movelist, and all these options are linked together by one of the deepest most freeform combat systems in gaming today. Western action titles like GOW have NOTHING on a game like DMC, which is packed with intricate combat mechanics such as cancelling and rebounding, DMC3 years after release sees combat videos where players demonstrated nothing but the sheer depth of the combat system, still finding new ways to link moves and combos. You need to watch videos, then find me anything from GOW even half as good.
Now if you want to get into things other than gameplay as you already admitted you see that the combat is debatable, lets talk about story. In my eyes, God of War offers a tragic story that of course invokes sympathy, but nonetheless the story remains the same. Kill kill kill. Anger! Kill more things. In fact if I had to describe Kratos in one word it'll be constipated. He seems he's always trying his hardest to release all that emotion bottled up inside of him but sadly all he can do is vent out with jump rope blades always having more and more anger to spare never fully cleansing himself. I guess that's the draw but its pretty damn repititive.
Now I'm not praising the Devil May Cry stories either as each game offers a pretty average (or less) story. But if you take a look at it as a whole, the entire series, you'll see a very complex and somewhat political world. Now of course God Of War has that too somewhat but because the backstory is based off of mythology, the back story is pretty dull having the politics go down to clearly black and white lines. Though of course the white doesn't mean good. At least in Devil May Cry its a plethera of mythologies to create a unique variation of demonic clans trying to succeed each other, join up, or survive. It's a bit more complex a bit a more sophistacated only when you disregard some of the extreme charactistics of certain people.