Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 8! My name's Hythrain, a co-host and one of the streamers for this event! This feedback is being written live as I stream your game! If you're interested in seeing my live reaction, let me know and I can send you a link to the VOD once it's posted to YouTube!
So my normal approach for any game in these events is simple: I get the game, make sure it's not a virus, then play it with as little information on how to play as possible. This way, I can judge how intuitively someone can figure out the game. Only if it's obvious that I need to read more will I do so. I note this so you can get a sense where some of these feedback comes from. In addition, I want to note that feedback and rating are different; don't use this feedback to gauge what I'll rate, nor should you view my rating as entirely indicative of my feedback.
My gosh, was I thrown for a loop when this went from a bullet hell to a cooking game. XD I was all ready for an action packed adventure, doing some really silly voices that were meant to have a bit of a southern accent (and by southern, I mean southern US, but maybe it could also be midwest, I don't know), and then bam! I'm cookin' soup for some hungry folk!
I liked the gameplay a lot. It felt satisfying to run around and shoot stuff, and the mechanic of switching between two colours to be able to shoot different enemies and block their attacks is fun. All of this was also accented by the phenomenal artwork presented. That said, there are definitely some points where I felt things could be improved.
The mechanic for jumping over cliffs feels clunky, due to the fact that it's not something where you'll land where you end the dash. I imagine you have it this way for prototype/alpha phases, but as time goes on you're going to want to clean that up. One way I think will help is that you make dashes longer. That way, the player is far more into the place they'll end up, avoiding any potential collision issues.
I'll also admit that I wasn't a fan of the time limit that was introduced in the second shooting section. Bullet hells can be rough as it and often require taking time, and the ammo system you have going on especially enforces this. A time limit just adds unnecessary pressure. Another thing I wasn't a fan of was needing to use two different buttons to switch colours. If you plan to add additional colours down the road then it makes sense, but if not I think it might be better to make it a single button for switching back and forth.
While I'm not as worried about how the ammo system works, I do agree with another comment I saw while writing this that talked about waiting to gain ammo (another reason I'm not a fan of the timer). I think an easy fix for this is to make ammo gains much larger when you have very low ammo. So say you're below 40% ammo; all your ammo gains are doubled until you get over 40%. This would speed things up on the low end but keep things normal on the high end.
Because you're making this in Unreal Engine, there's one thing I'm going to say now to keep in mind during development: optimize the crap out of everything. I know UE is difficult to optimize for, but UE is also rough for people with weaker PCs. Despite the hand drawn nature of the graphics in this game, there was enough lag that was it was negatively affecting my tuber model and killing its framerate. Keeping optimization in mind from the beginning will make your lives easier in the future, even if it may slow things down a bit now.
I'm really looking forward to more of this game. Also, I now really want a copy of that song during the prologue stage because that was such a cool song!