Thanks a lot for the in depth feedback! Agree with a lot of your points. It was not really intended to be punishing to play, it just kind of ended up that way as I had little time for balancing. This was also the first time doing enemies and pathfinding in Godot, so the performance is definitely a bigg problem.
I did purposely make the player faster than the enemies as otherwise it would be extremely hard and interestingly enough, not many people seemed to go for a cheese strat although that is super easy. I think some slower objectives would help with the cheesing (for example having to secure an objective while being in a zone for a certain amount of time) and having some despawn mechanics for the enemies or at least a cap to reduce lag.
The shooting and moving came out of ease really, instead of design (move player toward mouse, shooting is shooting straight ahead), but it does have a giant impact on gameplay. I also thought of dropping some bombs behind your or some one way shields to lean into this mechanic etc. All in all it's how I feel about the game as well, very proud of the foundation and juice in the time it took me, but it lacks a little bit of "game".