first of all, huge thanks for your intricate review and critique! getting constructive criticism is very important (and giving it is really hard!) so i am immensely grateful for you taking the time and writing it up :) i'll try to respond to (most of) them point by point, if that's ok. there's gonna by a lot of "In The Next Major Update" in here, so i'll probably abbreviate it or something lol
first of all, the guns will probably get a slight re-balance / redesign pass I.T.N.M.U. - don't know how extensive but a few things definitely will need tweaking. the idea with the "rifle" (it's supposed to represent a pistol-caliber carbine btw) was to have something a bit more precise and powerful but less spammy than the pistol - to fit between it and the actual rifle (which never made it in. whoops!). i might differentiate them a lil bit and have the carbine occupy a more rifle-like role, we'll see
the "removal" of unnecessary inputs (along with unlimited ammo) was purely to do with time constraints and prioritizing - i was planning on adding them but ran out of time. which is good, actually, because the game does feel better without them lol. of course, the entire user interface will need a major overhaul I.T.N.M.U. - honestly there's not much to call an interface in there at the moment
also yeah, the game does pull in two different directions, mostly because the whole possession mechanic wasn't even in it until about halfway through the development process. i was planning on doing just a fast-paced twitchy shooty thing with some cool slo-mo action, and being lazy/time-deprived i was hoping to reuse most of the code controlling the player for the enemies (only swapping the "brains" and keeping everything else the same, essentially) and then it kinda dawned on me lol
that said, i'd like to retain the fast-paced, chaotic bullets-flying-everywhere, hard-to-hit-anything-but-everything-dies-fast feel of combat, and i'd like for the player to have some ways of creatively approach the combat/possession situations, all the while not losing the sense of, uh, leanness to the game. guess it's gonna be quite hard to marry these two modes of play, which is a whoops. however, this is where posts such as yours are incredibly helpful - along with some really good advise and pointing out things that i might not have even considered (for example, i did not consciously understand the tension between the core mechanics until you pointed it out ), it really helps to see how other people approach the game, so, again, many thanks!
also yeah i played Driver San Francisco for a bit many, many years ago, and i did not even realise the connection up until your post lol. probably gonna need to have a fresh look at it