Fire your harpoon and tow cables, go for the circles !
Jokes aside it’s a very cool core concept, the fact that you only have the tether to attack enemies makes this pretty tense and it works well to have separated the tether shot’s direction from the movement direction to allow the player to get some distance while trying to hook the enemies.
My only issue with this system is the fact that the tether can only aim in 4 directions while you have full 8 way movement, this made it way harder than it should be.
I think if you added the ability to aim 8way as well this would improve gameplay a lot ^^
Other than this this is a pretty original mechanic and i hope you get to add more to this cause it’s quite interesting.
Well done :)