Very well polished! The sounds fit well, and the music was great. Some enemy designs reminded me of Momodora 1-3.
Gameplay-wise, sadly I'm not used to horizontal shooters, and also not feeling the bigger hitboxes and slower player movement so well. Thankfully the tutorial stage let you experiment with the mechanics and take some hits, so I had a fair idea of how large the hitbox is, but some of the issues I've had were:
- Because the player moves so slowly, sometimes it felt like there was too little time to react to attacks. The wave that spawns and shoots behind you at the start of stage 2 was what killed me, and the midboss' return towards the end of stage 1 kept draining my lives because the blackhole cooldown was so large and because its attacks didn't have large-enough gaps to fly through.
- Speaking of the blackhole ability, it really felt quite cumbersome to use. It slows you down, it has a cooldown, damages you if you hold it for too long, and the resulting laser attack is very narrow and lasts a short while, even at full power. Too many penalties. And while the full-powered laser does deal good damage if it connects, the problem is that the enemies you can use it on tend to move vertically a lot faster than the player's speed during blackhole, so usually the spots where you absorb bullets and the spots where you can attack the enemy efficiently are too far apart. For instance, if the second midboss' movement was timed so that it stays at the same spots where the player can absorb its attacks, it'd be so much more satisfying to use the laser against it imo.
- Lastly, the very small amount of lives (not sure if replenishible or not) combined with 0 continues felt extremely punishing. When I died at the start of Stage 2 I thought I'd be able to continue from there at least, but it sent me all the way back to the tutorial... Before I could progress back to stage 2 I got hit by some collisions, the attacks of the returning midboss #2, and finally finished off by the boss. Probably won't have the patience to finish the game at the moment, but may return to it later.
Overall - in my opinion, gameplay needs work, at the very least give the player more chances, or reduce penalties posed by current mechanics. It feels way too punishing to make mistakes right now and very little opportunity to learn from them. At the same time, you've got a very solid visual and audio foundation, which is quite impressive to achieve within only 10 days. Congratulations on finishing the jam! ^^