I gave your game a try and I think there’s definitely something interesting in the core gameplay loop. The fast/simple structure works well and I can see the foundation of a fun arcade-style experience here.
A few things stood out to me while playing:
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The art direction is mostly stylistically consistent, but there’s a very noticeable mismatch in asset quality. The player/enemies look very high resolution and polished while the large background looks extremely low-res, so the contrast feels a bit strange visually.
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The tutorial image at the start is well made, but it felt a bit overwhelming to immediately memorize all controls and mechanics before even playing. I think the onboarding would work better if some mechanics were introduced gradually during gameplay with small contextual reminders like “Press Q to use ability” etc.
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The UI feels very mobile-oriented even though this is currently a desktop game. Ironically I think the game could actually work quite well on mobile with some control adjustments.
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It took me a while to understand how the central upgrade/progression bar worked. I think this system needs stronger onboarding plus more visual/audio feedback (“juice”) so the player emotionally connects the mechanic to becoming stronger.
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Repeated clicking to shoot became tiring pretty quickly. Auto-shoot would probably make the game feel smoother and let the player focus more on movement and positioning.
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Combat feedback could be improved. Damage doesn’t feel very impactful right now and sometimes it feels like the player is “shooting peanuts” even when winning. More hit feedback, reactions, effects, sound, screen shake, etc. would help a lot.
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There are also a few polish issues like sprite flipping pivoting from the edge instead of the center, which makes movement feel slightly awkward visually.
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The mid-round upgrade choices were difficult to evaluate because they use terms/mechanics the player doesn’t fully understand yet. The upgrades also didn’t feel impactful enough to significantly change the run.
Overall though, I think the core gameplay idea is interesting and there’s potential here. Most of the issues I noticed feel more like onboarding/feedback/polish problems rather than fundamental design problems.