I generally like these type of management/tower defense games and this is certainly a cool take on it. However I was bombarded with features at first took me too long to realize what I was supposed to do. Because of how fast islands scale down it is better to just glide around the islands than stay in one and guard your drill so the repair feature or shooting is mostly useless. It also felt like I wasn't making any amount of progress. The upgrades negate other effects so much that it always feels like you are in one place and it's not worth upgrading. Whenever I die my progress resets back to 900smth and I just can't get the bar up. I understand that some of the things I mentioned are the way they are because of the tight deadline of a jam but they made the game frustrating to me.
Viewing post in Feed the Machine jam comments
Thank you for your feedback. We had multiple different versions of the game; earlier versions had fewer islands, they would shrink much slower, and/or there would be increasing cost of buying drills and/or turrets, which would incentivize players to spend time at each island and disincentivize hopping from one to another without giving each much thought. Most of the other versions were much more difficult and demanding, and during the last day much of our time was spent balancing, creating a tutorial level and making the game easier and more accessible. We also had a scaling system that we had to remove last minute because of a major bug. The final version of the game does not fully flesh out the mechanics or balance them in the best way but it's much easier for players to grasp and complete and it's less frustrating.
Balancing the game and effectively teaching all the mechanics to players was arguably the biggest challenge of its development.