Well designed, but frustratingly imbalanced
This game held my attention until about level 20, and I tried to think about what made me put it down in the end. Here's some thoughts:
-there's an extent to which getting the right achievements early on really defines the game. Somebody starting out won't focus on getting combos and it will end up screwing them over when they simply don't have enough upgrade points (25 as opposed to 20 in the early stages makes a big difference)
-the alien AI made absolutely no sense to me. It seemed you either had to get lucky or completely max out your speed/jump stats to be able to hit them - my tail on max size wasn't reaching them. They also did ridiculous damage, even with toughness maxed
-the damage stacked in sometimes ridiculous ways. As other reviewers noted, overlapping ships are a pain to approach. But, there's a bit of a paradox here. Usually you would stop, think, and take a different strategy. But the game actually encourages you to just rush in head on, because if you're lucky your combo and eating enough people will heal you more than you are getting hurt. I felt this reduced the game to luck - sometimes charging head on you would get lucky and emerge alive, and other times you wouldn't
-Combine that luck element with the fact that some of the combo achievements are hard to get early on, but DISAPPEAR if you die/restart a level - you can get a lot of great achievements and then die, only to have to restart with significantly fewer upgrade points.
-the "!" radar seemed very selective to me, as in it would not always display all enemies. Was it supposed to be a general radar or something else? Perhaps a minimap would help
-finally, some upgrades seemed pretty useless compared to others. O2 capacity compared to health or size, for example.
So, to the positives. The music was great, and the accordion was very catchy. The design was quite good, and apart from some explosions and sound glitchiness of simultaneously destroying 7 ships on top of each other, I felt the overall flow was very smooth.
In the end, it was disappointing to play so far into a game only to have enemies come and consistently kick my butt after a certain point. Especially when I felt I made a solid effort to get a good number of the achievements and experiment with different builds. I generally don't suck at these types of games and have completed a good number of "hard" NG games that get rated 3's for difficulty. I just had issues with the difficulty spikes in some levels and how quickly you can die, even with maxed defensive stats and playing strategically.
