Game design was poor...
... in that the controls are very non-responsive, the enemies greatly overpower the controllable character, and camera pan is too slow to even process the upcoming danger.
The fact that the sheer amount of food in the game gives you so many lives leads me to believe that the game designer either wanted you to die a lot and have to start over, which is a terrible concept, or realized after-the-fact that poor design lead to many deaths and added them in to add "balance".
Alternatively, once you get used to the controls and the several different hazards, the difficulty curve almost disappears. Then you end up easily jumping on the mindless enemies, timing the enemies which notice you, avoiding the extremely overused spikes, and snatching up lives by the handful.
I thought the game lacked balance and control. I would review more points, but the experience which I stopped playing on was a glitch where I was climbing a ladder, got shot by an enemy with a shotgun, but then did not die. The screen filled with blood, my character froze on the top of the ladder, and the enemy continued to shoot at me. My only option was to go to the menu, where I lost my checkpointed progress and had no desire to replay the game from the beginning.