I went into this game thinking it's not the type of game I'd enjoy. I was wrong. I also went into this game thinking that there's a reason why so many people praise it. I was wrong.
Let me start by saying that you are one of my favourite devs; I see your passion; I am taking into consideration this is a prototype and not a complete game; and I can appreciate the creative vision I see in the demo. However, that doesn't get you off the hook. I'm not gonna beat around the bush.
This demo is bad.
MAJOR PROBLEMS
Is the game stimulating? Yes. Did it feel like playing something from 20 years ago? Yes. Is it clear that you put a lot of effort into it? Yes. Is the game fun? No.
There's almost no weight to anything. It's a mech game, yet you can't feel the weight of absolutely any part of it. The combat it good for a dopamine hit but it's not very engaging at all. There's no tactical angle to it. The enemies do not display any sign of strategic thinking. The guns aren't interesting to use and there aren't different enemies and situations that demand different approaches and weapons. These are all things you should be thinking about if this is planned to become a game that people want to play and replay.
This is UI gore.
The UI is distracting, messy, and disorienting. I get what the game is going for since it's a "mech game" but there's two problems: The UI takes up an enormous part of the screen in a game that's supposed to be an FPS. You have limited readability of an environment and enemies that are hard to read to begin with in a game where having awareness of your surroundings is key. Second problem is that all of the important parts of the UI do not have the contrast or colour design to make them stand out, which means that the player doesn't have immediate awareness of those UI elements unless he takes his attention away from the action to check the interface. It's unclear if a lot of the UI icons serve any purpose or if they're just there for decorative filler. I did like that the screen cracks as the health goes down because that at least give a good way to track health.
Lag spikes constantly. Sometimes happens when beginning to shoot a group of enemies or when walking into some objects. It happened the most often when you open fire for the first time during any level.
There's a lot of jank. Twitching and teleporting across the levels. Some of might be intentional (I assume) but the game doesn't make that clear so half of the time you wonder what even happened.
The level design fluctuates between good and awful. For some reason the best designed level is the arcade stage. The story mode levels are really barren and boring to traverse through.
I remember someone in the thread saying that the game is messier than ever and needs polish and I agree.
MINOR PROBLEMS
The bots that snipe you with perfect accuracy from across the map are bullshit. I'm not even sure if the game has health pickups to recover from that in any way. Even if it does it was never made clear.
In the arcade mode enemies spawn in these big piles. Often they spawn stacked on top of each other.
What does fortress mode do? It's not explained even in the tutorial.
The text boxes overlapped a few times.
For some reason getting hit by a rocket turns you 90 degrees to the side.
Since the cockpit bobs up and down, this happens constantly which makes it even harder to read the dialogue.
There's a lot of objects around the levels such as the yellow triangles and the transparent blue orbs where it's unclear what they do or what they are or if they even do anything.
CONCLUSION
Here's some positives: The character art is really good and looks professional. I was mildly intrigued by the story and I thought the dialogue was uniquely styled. I hope this feedback is useful to you.
If this is just a learning project and it's not supposed to be a commercial product eventually then this is great work, but the game I'm seeing now doesn't do anything special to make people want to play it again and again and again. I enjoy seeing your progress.