Ayy great job for making it that far!
I do agree that the damage increase could be communicated a bit more clearly, there's currently no sound que/indicator that your attacks are dealing more damage (the dashers have 3 HP actually so 2 hits were normal). I'll try to add a bit more effects or things to communicate them better in a future patch! (Even with 10 days, I can't exactly polish everything XD, thanks for letting me know tho!)
Shielded enemies defo are a pain to deal with, there's a shield piercing upgrade that lets you instantly destroy them, originally the damage increase would also do the same thing but it got a bit too OP (no one needed the shield piercing upgrade) so we had to create a temporary "duct-tape" solution to balance it out.
As for gamepad support, it was originally in the game, but something broke it, not quite sure what happened but will defo polish things up a bit more.
Genuinely though, thanks for the constructive feedback! (Seriously!) Will attempt to rectify most of these Issues in a future patch/android release, Thanks for trying it out ✨!
P.S. There's actually hidden mechanic to the attack system (this isn't taught anywhere in the game, will also fix that in a future patch), every third attack will do a "stab/lunge" attack (your attacks are a bit longer than usual) which also does double damage to non-shielded enemies. Originally this could also pierce shields but my duct-tape solution broke it ._.