Thanks for the feedback, I'm glad you found it fun!
About the movement, in the first version I made, the game did actually allow you to hold down a key to move in that direction, but I found it to be more annoying than useful. It created really imprecise movement where you'd run straight into enemies and also the diagonal movement was really weird. But that was just my experience with it, maybe other people would enjoy it more that way, I'll consider looking into it further.
And about the animations, I'm not a very great pixel artist so I thought I'd keep things simple and not add many animations into the game, rather focusing on making it feel good. But I 100% agree it could be better with proper movement animations implemented.