Fairly charming and has good potential, but has a number of easy to fix flaws
- no way of telling how much health you have as far as I can tell
I don't think that this one really requires an explanation, if something on screen is already serving as the health bar it is not at all obvious.
- cutscenes get very repetitive on the second/third/nth time playing a stage
This is fairly easy to fix, I would either not take control away from the player while cutscenes/text are playing and add some collectibles in the environment to shoot so that the player has time to reload their guns in the downtime and stays stimulated/engaged/has something to do on repeat playthroughs
- aiming with the mouse feels off
This one is kind of tricky and I won't pretend like I know how to make this feel better. If it were my game I would try a few things and see how they contribute to the feel of the game.
1) have the majority of the screen covered by a bounding box, when the cursor reaches the edges of the screen pan just a bit in the direction that the cursor is in (see attached image, I think it'll make more sense)
2) ditch the crosshair and attach laser sights to the guns, I think the crosshair and 2d movement of the mouse makes depth perception harder than it would normally be. Usually you're getting the depth/3D feel from the gun in your hand when you're playing this sort of game, I don't know how to describe it properly but something feels very off with the 2d crosshair and 2d mouse movement with no tangible connection to the 3d world
All that being said it is very fun and charming. I can't think of any projects on itch shooting for this rail shooter style game and hitting the mark as well as this one.