Thanks! I appreciate it. The game is definitely hard and a lot of people struggle to both move & shoot, but hey, devil daggers-esque games gonna be hard.

You shoot the logs, haha. I don't think that's ever shown though. My bad.

Thanks a tonne!

Thanks for playing!

Don't worry bout the rank, game's hard.

Improvements:

• Completely agree on the practice arena, might implement that, good shout!
• It does tell you at the start of a run, in the top left, but it does tend to go away if you accidentally use the mechanic, so I should up the number of times before the message leaves.
• The majority of the difficulty in the game is that you must always be bhopping, movement is paramount, the intent is that you are constantly trying to evade enemies, while using the overhead platforms for both spatial awareness and as the primary shooting surface.
• This is definitely a way to play! I'm aware it's an option, but it is most definitely not possible to win the game doing this, and as it's a score attack game I'm kind of fine with the "statue strat" as i've heard people joke about calling it continuing to exist - there's actually a winning run replay on the itch page that you can pop in your replays folder, if you want to watch how to win a run.
• Yep, intentional, the game difficulty is in evasion and managing the arena, shooting in person is for when you really need to clear the line in front of you - you actually get a charged shot if you wait before shooting that penetrates and deals more damage for this exact purpose, but this isn't mentioned anywhere (again, I should probably add a bit more guidance.)
• There are no headshots, no. The game holds a lot of complexity that isn't well described - it's mostly for people that want to be constantly moving very quickly and mowing down the enemies to maintain arena control, or abusing "roil" - which is a mechanic you may or may not have interacted with depending on how far you got - for extra score - it's all in the leaderboards!

Thanks for checking out the game, I appreciate the feedback - I think a big challenge of this is going to be 'putting across how the game works' and I like the idea of a practice arena that you mentioned, so that might be the next big patch, with a bit of guidance within it. Cheers for the suggestion, I hadn't thought of it!

Cheers a bunch for playing it - it's a hard game, I commend that you're continuing to try!

As for performance, aye, constant battle, trying my best to keep performance as smooth as I can, I'm not letting it go under 144 on my system (RTX 4070, 32GB RAM, Ryzen 7 5700G), but I can imagine it can be touch and go depending on hardware. Been trying to test it on my wife's laptop to try to keep it running at least reasonable, but there's always more optimisation to be doing.

Again, cheers for trying it, keep at it - if you want some guidance, there's a winning run replay I did that should (hopefully) function if you download it and move it into your replays folder.

Thanks man, appreciate it! 

my thank