Thanks for your elaborate feedback! It's a real treasure trove!
It would be possible to go 360 but it probably would require another projection style to be useful (panoramic or equirectangular instead of fisheye), although that might take out a lot of the perceived speed. We initially had the player character hold an actual orb (as a 'weapon' view model) that showed what's behind the player. Kind of like a back mirror. But during playtesting we found that you'd never actually look into the orb since you'd be mostly focused on aiming and what's in front of you. So maybe having a 360 fov might defragment that information.
You're absolutely right about having more means of crowd control. That's a missed opportunity. We had pain responses and knockback in mind but as always, time was the ultimate constraint. We focused on creating different enemy behaviours instead and sadly at some point totally forgot about crowd control mechanism. There was also an idea for a secondary fire mode, like a charge attack of some sort with additional pushback or slowdown within an area.
I'm sure there's a lot potential for elaboration and we certainly didn't exhaust all interesting possibilities. Orbhead 2 maybe ;)
Thanks for playing and for the nice words!