Maybe the main problem here is that you get so close to regular 3D that we just have to complain about the typical things we care about in 3D, like the camera, while we ignore the player animation, the star field, the editor (yeah I "played that" because I was curious), the lighting and semispherical effects for the taser and win, etc. In a way, it does feel like that, like you got too close to general 3D, and for the average player that doesn't understand what's going on under the hood... it may not translate so much into a visually unique result as other of the games you made? Some of the fancy details got drowned by the scale of the chase, in a sense.
I wonder if you have any plans to develop this style further, e.g., a "paper mario"-like framework to work with more generally (paper3D vs tetra3D war incoming?), or if it hasn't inspired anything in particular that you would want to bother working on. As a proof of concept is very interesting, but unlike your knowledge on animating characters with shaders, it doesn't seem so easy to reuse situationally?