Nice work shibey :) Really like the art and narrative as always. You've got some good enemy variety too. The second boss with the massive hand that comes out actually made me jump a bit, that was pretty cool.
I definitely had a hard time beating this one though I eventually managed to do it. I think there's a few things that you could try to make things a little more doable:
- A lot of the time you'll get the shield powerup before any offensive upgrade, which often ends up with you losing the shield powerup because you can't destroy the enemies as effectively. You could make it so the shield only spawns once you've gained at least one offensive upgrade.
- The acceleration based movement kind of threw me off, I feel like for most shmup type games they have linear movement. The acceleration also means that if you follow your bullets forward, you can catch up to them (Resulting in a big stack of bullets, which while fun doesn't end up being very effective)
- I felt like some of the upgrades weren't worth it. The laser seemed the strongest to me, followed by the curving shots, the spread shot, and then last would be the rockets. They just felt too slow by comparison. The upgrade that takes you back to the normal shot was a bit annoying -- the icon for it looks a bit similar to "speed up" so I kept picking those up and losing my laser or curvy shot or whatever.
Take all that with a grain of salt and whatnot since good game difficulty is a fine line :P
I'm not going to nitpick the art, but I think since you outlined some of the background buildings and such it might look better to outline the main character as well. The enemies read really well with the red outlines and black interior, it'd be good to have the main character pop out a similar amount.