Love me a good bullet hell. Over all good job, visuals are nice and crisp and the gameplay is nice an easy to learn. There were only two notes of mine that I noticed in my few rounds. 1) I'd say rework  the controls screen, it was kind of hard to decipher it, 2) I had a few times where the game would just continue without spawning new enemies or continuing to the next round. My theories are that either an enemy was left behind or there was an issue detecting my death? Other than that solid job

I like to think I know my way around a shmup, I dabble in touhou and I enjoy games like border down, zero ranger, et cetera. I feel like those games, while great, are kinda a game you have to be in a sort of mindset for, and are for a certain type of people. I feel like this would be a great primer to more intimidating shmup/bullet hell games. Id argue that this one leans a bit more towards the easy side. I think it would be cool if you maybe the speed up a notch  There also came a point towards the end where I had like 10 specials and pretty much nothing could touch me. Id love to see the game maybe get faster, or some more variety in bullet patterns, touhou style. All in all, solid stuff! 

While I'm probably better than average at shmups, I don't consider myself an expert by any means (I've never touched the touhou games), and the difficulty felt fairly low. After looping through level 5 a few times I dropped out at around 80k points, but at that point it felt pretty rote.

I think if the difficulty ramped up faster or farther, it would be a better experience, but as it is, it feels too slow and simple. There is decent enemy variety, but the last level doesn't use all of them, and since that's the one that repeats, it feels stale fairly quickly. The last level is missing the missile enemy, which is one of the more challenging ones, I think.

Another issue with the difficulty is that the powerup is *very* strong and *very* easy to acquire, leading to basically no threat to a decent shmup player who doesn't use them constantly. I began using them basically every time I felt at all threatened, and still had a stock of over 20 of them.

That said, ramping up the enemy variety and difficulty farther would quickly improve the experience, in my opinion. Those aspects are primarily what's holding it back.

Also, the keyboard controls are very awkward. WASD to move with Z and X for shooting and powerups makes you stack your hands on top of each other, or else make you contort your left hand in bizarre ways if you want to only use that hand. I had to plug in my controller to play.

- Visuals: Straightforward and easy to read! 

- Sound: In a shmup, audio cues are pretty important. I would have liked to hear one whenever I picked up a special because I wasn't sure if I actually grabbed it or not. I did like the music and the audio effect when using your special is fun.

- Engagement: On an initial playthrough, the ramp up was appreciated in learning the controls, movement, and enemies. But on replays, I would have liked for the faster/more bullet hell parts to come sooner. Maybe this is just an issue with shmups in general though? A multiplier system of some sort might be a good way to keep players engaged in the early stages of a replay.

- Spectator Appeal: It's a shmup! You'll have people yelling and going "aaaa" when you barely dodge a bullet (especially after using a special.) They're classic for a reason.

- Ease of learning: For what it's worth, I played on a gamepad and found the controls pretty accessible. I did find the initial movement a little slow and that took some getting used to. However. I'm also very used to Treasure/CAVE shmups which usually has jumpy, frantic movement.