As someone who loves hotline miami, this was quite cool to play. You nailed the satisfying part of punching someones' head off, the movement feels just right and the art is quite good and clear.
I have a lot of things to say about it, but to be honest this is mainly because i liked it enough to play for more than half an hour.
I think it could be fine to use life as a cost for abilities, but you would have to make it very clear how much life we have left and what we can use without dying.
Also, the fact that we can only hurt ennemies from the back when full HP coupled with the seemingly perfect tracking of ennemy AI means that being full HP in a fight makes you basically useless until you get hit.
For example the first 3 ennemies, either i wanna be able to dash behind them and attack quickly from behind, or i want to be able to punch them from the front, but right now it just feels like punching and dodging randomly until they somehow die...
The katana ennemies also feel like rng, maybe they could have some opening when we evade their charge, because right now the best strategy i found is spamming attack and praying, or a well timed smoke but the timing is awfully tight.
One thing that adds to their difficulty is the static camera. One of the big strength of hotline miami is how much it lets you plan ahead and observe before everything goes to shit, meanwhile in this game it felt like i had to memorize every timing by heart to survive off screen ennemies charging at me.
Ennemy placement seems to force a bit too much head on engagements, once again emphasizing the other problems.
Now i wanna talk about some more minor stuff, just in case some flew under your radar. The invisibility ability feels like it's supposed to be a panick button, but the high cost means you can only use it when everything is still fine (or is it just a "skip part of the level" button?).
When climbing the ladder i get stuck for like one second, and every time it's enough to get me killed so i couldn't see what was over there.
Sometimes ennemies don't aggro, seems to mainly happen to the flashlight guy in the top right corner.
I don't know if this is because of the i mentionned above or if he has too much health, but i didn't manage to kill the shotgun guy after tens of tries.
The crossbow ennemies deserve to have some kind of visual indication when they fire, would make big fights more easy to keep track of.
The shadow mechanic seems promising, maybe it could affect movement speed, attack power, or just buff abilities.
Also, it could be interesting to throw bodies like weapons in hotline, but maybe this would ruin the melee only vampire experience idk.
Overall this was enjoyable, and really damn impressive for a 50h game, but my experience has been held back by all those things. I'm sure a lot of it just comes down to a lack of time, but i hope at least one of my comments was useful to you.
-Mathieu