All in all, the price point gave me a game I expected. Looks nice, bit more of a casual shmup than I'm normally into, but enjoyable enough to replay a few times with the unlockable Survival Mode and the ability to try out various upgrade combinations. I see a lot of pallete/retextured versions of the playable creature, might be nice to have alternate colour schemes unlockable too if it's not too difficult to implement.
Some kind of scoring system would be nice and would add to the replayability. It could also do with a bit of extra polished touches like the ending screen pointing out that you've unlocked an extra difficulty and mode (granted it should be obvious to anyone, but still), and a screen showing you what upgrades you cleared the game with (so you can keep track and try out a different set of upgrades next time).
The blood attraction upgrade seems a tad overpriced. The health boost (which seems a must if you're trying for a no deaths run since you'll usually be only a couple hits from death without it) is only 30 whereas the blood magnet's a whopping 120 (with spread being only 100!). It's not like
Frantic where enemies drop tons of cash and you're limited in movement by the density of the bullets... most of the blood in the game is easily collected, and you may miss a half dozen small orbs at most, a negligible amount compared to the cost of the blood attractor!
I think the reason the beam feels overpowered is partly due to how the speed charge ability makes it amazingly good. Charge shots already deal a ton of damage, with the beam making it amazingly easy to hit with - if you had to charge twice as long to go from the orb shot to the beam (as in an additional charge level) it might balance things?
Still not fond of the health drain over time. You can get enough blood to replenish health in stages, but now that I'm playing Elder God, 1 hit basically means death versus a boss... you lose too much health to kill the boss before your health runs out (I'm playing with the health boost but without using charge shot). If you don't have the health to actually kill a boss in time, and you die even if you're not hit again, what's the point? Just kill the player and be done with. It'd feel less jarring if the game dropped your health over time but didn't actually kill you for running out of blood - it just meant the next hit would kill you, at least for boss fights.
Counter wave and rear shot are icky. Counter wave requires getting hit, which won't save you when colliding with an asteroid or solid object does massive or instant damage (and destroys the object anyways) and simply is not worth the price when you can get close range fire shots for even cheaper. Most of the time you're hit by enemy bullets while far away or by objects that can't be killed... Rear shot is basically never needed unless an enemy gets by you (and the amount of blood lost from a few small enemies isn't enough to justify having it for this).
An upgrade that would come in handy is something to increase the width of your shots or firing speed. Your shots are thin and have a slow firing rate - the inability to kill enemies in a timely fashion is probably what makes this game the toughest. Even with spread and flame enemies at a distance can be tricky, especially by the fire level where positioning gets extremely tricky. Enemies fire three way spreads at you while you have to avoid wandering into the path of the fireballs being launched... this is actually the toughest level of the game, IMO.
Speed charge + charge shot is ridiculously useful. Possibly the single biggest offensive upgrade you can get, other than going from the charge shots to the beam. The basic shots even when upgraded just don't stand up to the charge shot's sheer power. Actually, the beam isn't even as useful, simply because you get it so late, and the speedy charge is what makes charge shots powerful, beam or otherwise.
