I played this for a few hours, and really enjoyed it! I love the look, and the feel of playing this - it is nice and juicy :)
I have a few bits of feedback, but take them with a grain of salt since it is only my opinion!
I felt like the friend and life systems should be merged... maybe there should be no lives but the game is over when the player runs out of friends?
The other thing that jumped out at me was that I never really felt as though I had a choice to save my friends -- might be cool to have the friends take a long time to die, so I can go and rescue them :)
There were a few other minor things as well -- it would be good if the shooting could be more than 8 directions, since the movement is, when I was playing with the keyboard I wanted to aim/shoot with the mouse, and when I played with a gamepad it seemed like a strange restriction.
Great game, I look forward to seeing more progress!