Damn, hard mode's got hands; I've only made it to wave 7 so far.
Rust & Dust feels like the sort of twin-stick shooter that I would have played on a flash game website after school. This is very high praise.
I really like the the way that the crosshair locks onto the enemies. It's a very "mech" way of aiming, coming to the same conclusion as Armored Core's sight lock via a different path. I find it impressive that despite disconnecting the mech's aiming from my mouse's position, it never felt like I was lacking control over my choice of target - that must have taken a lot of tweaking to get feeling so good!
I also enjoy the interplay between the chunky dual machine guns and the powerful missile launcher. I felt that I had to be quite conservative with ammo on normal, but with the addition of so many flying units that drop missile pickups in hard, the balance was much closer to ideal.
I do question two game design decisions:
- I'm not sure of the benefit of the overheating mechanic. I found it more frustrating than anything, always kicking in when I was getting into the groove of laying down a hail of bullets. Is it supposed to create an ebb and flow to the combat?
- I wish that the pickups dropped by the static turrets and the large tanks would spawn sooner after defeating the unit. I think that the pace of gameplay was interrupted each time that I had to hang around the corpse waiting for it to despawn.
Other than that, I have few complaints. Maybe some slightly better feedback to taking small arms fire? You've already got a brilliant impact effect when being shot by the large tanks, so something a little less dramatic would be great to indicate when I'm being chipped away.
Overall, this is excellent for a solo game jam entry! I hope you do well in the results!