Thanks for the good input! I deliberately avoided going the twin-stick route which would've been an obvious choice. Perhaps I'll add an option to enable "strafing" that locks your firing direction while the <shoot> button is held.
It propably isn't clear, but you can dash through the enemy beams even without any upgrades to get out of tight spots. But it's good that you found one of the central points of the upgrade system, that you can go all-in on your abilities: be it the dash, bombs, gun or something else.
You're propably right about the difficulty, I couldn't figure out quite how to ramp it up effectively (wanted to keep the scope small so didn't go all out on enemy types). I also intended for most players to die before phase 15...
As for the controller input, I've been using DS4windows so it propably skews things a bit, I'll look into it...
Thanks for the review!