Furious Angels

I really like it, but it feels more frustrating than difficult/fun. But I hit #1 on the leaderboards, so, that has to count for something. It's wonderful to look at and plays pretty well, although I have some reservations about the control scheme (at least, playing on mouse.) Watching the enemy ships come apart is basically what kept me playing. My first issue is a feeling of "That's it?" Admittedly, Furious Angels does advertise itself as a score attack shooter with different waves every day, so, I can't fault it for that, but I was just left with this feeling of wanting more from it. My real issue is some of the enemies and how much feedback the game would give me. It feels like some enemies would kill me immediately, such as Bombers, or their missiles would be affected by how I was turning or manoeuvring. And sometimes I'd just get vaporized. Miners were similar, but at least's clear how they worked. What unites them both is how un-fun they became if a daily wave focused heavily on them. I've watched some videos on Youtube and it feels like I was dealing with a lot more mines and missiles. I also find the system where if you travel too far from the carrier, it'd get ambushed and almost immediately destroyed by an enemy carrier to be more frustrating than anything else. The game doesn't tell you how far you can wander from your carrier, and I had a few runs where I'd be ejected from my tank upgrade at such a velocity that I'd fall outside the zone and see my carrier get blown up in seconds. Not fun. The upgrade system isn't communicated ideally either. The core idea is pretty obvious. You get kills, you get a new type of weapon, and so on. Homing missiles, multi-shot, a laser beam. But I had to dig around to find out what the "Mark" system did (a global damage upgrade up to a maximum of five) and I'm not actually sure if that's communicated in the game anywhere. I also generally don't like upgrade systems that make optimal play sacrificing them early (you should immediately sacrifice your Mark 1 and Mark 2 tanks) and generally don't reward keeping them as long as possible. All that said, for under $10 you can't go wrong if you want to fly around and blow stuff up. But it does feel a lot like a prototype of a game that might've had more upgrades, more enemies, more everything.