I think I understand the problem. I've been watching game design videos  recently and they've talked about some stuff that applies here.

Strong effects in games tell us how we make a difference in the game world. At the moment there is big effects for blocking the damage (sound, visuals, screen shake) but little effects for bouncing the ball.  It gives the feeling that my job is shielding and the ball is just an extra bit to make shielding easier.

You to switch those around a bit. Little effects for shielding bigger effects for bouncing so that bouncing feels like the impactful choice (also in terms of dopamine response in the brain, if bouncing is the behavior you want to encourage than the effects on it will be what reinforces the behavior).

Narratively speaking, we are also told that our job is to "protect the nuke at all costs". Change that to say something like "destroy the attack ships blocking your way".  It might be a good idea to not even tell the players that they can block the attacks and let them learn that as they play.

In terms of game play when we have to make a choice between bouncing the ball the and protecting the nuke there is never much reason to choose bouncing the ball. You want to find a way to encourage the player to take that risk. Maybe there is bonus score for bouncing streak? Maybe the ball bounces a bit faster on a streak? maybe the reflector gets a little smaller if you drop the ball?
If there was indicator for how many hits the nuke could take and a progress bar for the regeneration we'd also be more willing to make sacrifices because we know what we are giving up.

Its possible to balance things and make both feel equally important but the bouncing is active gameplay and the shielding is passive gameplay so I think that it will make the game more engaging to focus on the bouncing and let the the shielding be a bit more secondary.

Some other gameplay things I noticed:

• There was some weird physics when I hit the ball right on the side that experience with break out games made me think would turn out differently (I imagine the collision detection physics make programming the bit difficult, maybe you could implement a minimum value for the upwards vector?)
• When the nuke got hit by the beam attack it barely got over the edge but it took the nuke out straight away and felt a bit unfair (maybe narrow the beam attack, add invincibility frames, or time delay on the beam doing the damage if the nuke isn't being hit by the middle section of the beam
• The score at the top of the screen was cut off a bit (this was pc version)
• In the description  you also said "made up of geometric shapes" and "Why a ball? Its wartime, don't ask questions!!". Players will automatically not worry about stuff like that and pretend it makes sense to feel immersed. But if you tell them not to think about something that's harder to do. If the description said it was space dragons I would think "cool" and believe you, even though it is just shapes. If you just say aliens I'll start building my own ideas about what the shapes represent. But if you say "its just shapes, don't worry about it" I won't engage my imagination because I know 'the truth' and it will make the world feel blander.

I hope some of this was useful. As I said at the start, this is something I've been learning about recently so I'm applying that knowledge and this is the changes I would look at making, so if this stuff doesn't fit your vision then don't worry about it (I also have no idea how easy/complex  any of this would to program but I'm sure that that would make a big difference to you about how good any of this advice is).

Hi Groovy ! Glad to see you still working on it !

I think you should set the gravity to 0, that's a very weird thing when we are in space to see our ball driven by gravity., and the main grief i have against your ball is the bounce angles on the shield that are completely "ununderstandable" (i hope this is the right word).

A thing that could help a lot (just my opinion), and i didn't manage to put the right words on it last time : your action is vertical, and horizontal movements are what make the game boring at moments (when the ship is too far from the ball, when the ball is catched by gravity, when the enemies are out of reach ...). So here is my thought: go the vertical path ! Literally ! You could stretch the screen vertically, like mobile screens, and increase the speed of the ball speed a lot. That would restrain the horizontal movement annoyance and give depth to your action. Furthermore you could put lots more of stuff in this new vertical space, and more action is what i need playing your game.

Hope this helps.

See ya !