hey! firstly, thanks so much for playing and for your feedback, really detailed feedback like this honestly helps me a lot so i appreciate it. Sorry it took so long to get back to you i was on vacation and i wanted to actually sit down and reply to you properly so had to wait until today :D
I'm just going to go through some of your points that i wanted to comment on.
points 4, 5 and 6 are completely valid, honestly sound mixing turned out to be an absolute nightmare for me and was so much harder to sort out than i anticipated. I was worried that the flare sounds might be too annoying like you mentioned but i think i maybe went to far in the other direction. Same with the voice alerts for the boxes. As for the shotgun sound, yep, that's really annoying for me also, it's one of the engine flaws, the sound is actually tied to the reload animation so if i extended the sound the shotgun would reload to slowly so it was just one of those things i had to put up with :D
very valid point about it potentially being to easy. As i played this numerous times over and over when playtesting i was scared i'd be making it to hard for beginner players so I tried to balance it accordingly and i think that maybe i went to far in the other direction again. I'll look at balancing it out better.
the save point bug is very very strange, i downloaded and fired up the version on itch and it seems to reload the save just fine for me. When you load are you clicking on the 'Slot 1' option? it should have 2 diamond shapes either side of it so you know its an active load file? I tried it by manually loading and also by getting killed and it loaded straight back into the slot i saved so it's hard for me to replicate this. if you have any more info so i can figure out the bug i'd appreciate it.
I tried to mitigate the collision bugs as best i could but because of the nature of the engine thats sometimes hard but i'll see if i can fix some collision/noclipping stuff in a future update.
some questions from me now if you have time:
1. did you use the slow-mo feature at all? if so, what did you think of it? if not was that because you didn't know about it or just thought it was unnecessary?
2. did you complete the side missions? if so what did you think of the upgrades you got from them?
thanks again for your time playing it. It really does mean alot to me :)