Fun! I'd really like the ability to save my designs, though. I used basically the same motive setup for the entire game, and it was kind of a pain to re-make each round.
Also: needs more upgrades (maybe at $50K, then 250K, then 1.25M, and so on?), more enemy types, and better background music. Maybe start decreasing health drops as the game progresses. Great game overall, just flatlines in difficulty after a surprisingly short time.
Please either allow mouse ship control, or the ability to exit the store with the "s" key. Switching between mouse and keyboard controls is painful (in the -hp sense!)
/// One thing you could try is letting us set a favored form to shift+click, although that's a bit of a stopgap. Also, Q and E should cycle through weapons in a loop, not wall out at the highest/lowest numbered weapons. One of upping the drop rate on ammo, automatically granting a fair amount of ammo at the end of each level, or making the pistol unlimited would be a nice gesture, as would taking another look at your autoreload implementation. I understand why you did Essences along with Focus, but I don't think they really *add* much to the player's experience. If you really want to retain them, consider significantly increasing the length of time characters can normally remain in a form.
Also: Right now the game demands simply too much attention juggling for me to really enjoy it. I have to worry about essences, focus bar, which form I'm in (and it's not particularly easy to hit the form buttons from WASD, much less juggle weapons while doing so), health, ammo (both my total and manually reloading), etc etc. The mechanics are neat, but the carpal acrobatics just aren't worth it.
When the main weapon goes to autoreload, it seems to simply display the bar and do nothing until I hit R to manually reload it. Also: Consider upping the movement speed increases on Agility, using something other than skill points for ammo/essence costs, and/or letting us sell unwanted ammo/essences.
"Being obnoxious" isn't a substitute for "hard." It's the same freaking thing over and over: Lose fight, respec, repeat until you figure out (or for some bosses, guess) the correct strategy. Even then, an inconvenient miss or a first-attacking enemy group ganging up on one target means starting the fight all over again. And if you want the hard badge and you run out of money: add step, "restart game." I really liked the original Sonny, but this one gets 2/5.
As far as I can tell, the magic stat does lead to a linear increase -- just not with a slope of 1. It's -2.5 cost per point (so maxing it at 20 gives you -50 cost per spell/ability). I think the life stat works similarly, but damage from enemies is pretty random, so it's hard to tell for sure. Increasing it definitely does refill your life meter, though -- which can be pretty handy in the colloseum.
Yeah... it seems like it's pointless to upgrade anything besides the general, since a single critical hit can wipe out even your most heavily-armored units, and there's no way to restart the mission. At least if you massively upgrade your general it has a small chance of soloing.
Alright, I'm sick of this. Why do your power batteries randomly drain out even when your guns aren't firing? Why does your food requirement go up when your *max* population rises? Why is getting the research unit so expensive? Gah. If it gets fixed, I'll up the 2/5... the second star was for it being funny. I can't imagine why it got such a high rating as it did, though.
Kinda didn't like the inability to make crippling shots -- I spent like five to ten minutes trying to shoot the final boss's hand off so he'd drop the case and I could detonate it.
Still, it was overall a good game. If you do a sequel, I'd like to see Chief Mitchell come up at some point as an overwhelmed officer who's doing his best to manage a corrupt and cowardly police force, rather than a straight-up incompetent hack. I don't mind that the main character thinks of him that way, I just like three-dimensional characters.
Speaking of which, it might be kind of nice to throw in some conflicted bad guys, so we get to see just how ruthless Anaksha is.
4/5. It's very good, but I know you can do better.