(I considered putting this in brainstorming, but in the end I thought it was best here.)
I first tried AVWW ages ago now, shortly after the switch to side on, when it still had fairly hefty strategic elements, EXP and vast continents.
It was sooooo boring. Bleh.
Thankfully, it's much better now! - the lack of respawning enemies makes it feel like you're actually getting somewhere (though it can be annoying to enter a building, clear it, and then have the surface room full of stuff again - what do people think of the parent region (the outside chunk they're situated in, for most buildings) not get dropped in terms of monsters? Or at least remember a percentage of how many were killed, or something?)
The character building up isn't bad, enchants look fun and interesting, and the right-arm slot already has dozens of useful choices, which I switch out as necessary.
It's also quite clear now that it's a platform shooty adventure game, NOT anything at all strategic, which stops me trying to play it like that, and it has a quite nice metroid vibe.
I do have a few concerns though. First, many of the spells are blocked until quite a bit later. That's fine, but most of the ones you CAN get to are pretty similar... I can't unlock -any- shields until Tier 3 or something (I checked - plums, T3), which is quite a while when you're new.
Some taster spells from all categories would be wonderful. A non-elemental, strictly inferior shield that still gives you the option to shield perhaps (make sure to mention in the description that the elemental shields are much better, or people might not use them). Additionally, more stats in the crafting bench menu or inventory menu would be good, like number of shots, projectile speed, maximum range, that sort of thing.
On the subject of spells, they're a bit... mundane. Have you seen Triangle Wizard? If not, it's an excellent example of diverse spells - it has slow spells, fast spells, homing spells, spells that make walls of damage, normal walls, lines, circles, clouds, swarms of killer bees and bouncy things.
As a beginner, MOST of my starting spells in AVWW travel in a straight line at various speeds. I'm not even sure if any of them are significantly longer ranged than others. They do different damages and things, and Energy Pulse gets a pass as it's high cooldown, high burst damage, and pierces, so it's nicely different.
But fireball and ball lightning? And tidal pulse? All very similar.
I'd like to get quite early access to some more variety - some instant-hit spells that draw a line, perhaps quite limited in range. Miasma Whip is sort-of like this, and if you made the projectile move faster and longer (I think about four times the range - about to the edge of the screen but no further) it would fill that role, but I'd still like to see it be instant-hit, because then it would inherantly be more accurate. Lightning-bolt springs to mind.
Some sort of spell that waves backwards and forwards in an S pattern like the clockwork probe shot! (tidal pulse would be excellent for this I feel - do we already get something like this?).
Some sort of spell affected by gravity would be excellent - I know Launch Rock does this from experience, but it takes a little work to unlock - probably about the right amount. Something that travels slower and is more grenade like would be good as well.
Some sort of area-of-effect burst spell right from the beginning would be very good to have - typically Fireball does this, but it's more like Firebolt here. That's fine, it's nice and frequent, but something that goes blam would be great. I notice that both Earth and Water both only have 1 spell with zero requirements, so perhaps a water-grenade sort of spell, and a low duration earth wall that blocks both yours and the enemies shots, has health, and otherwise dissolves quickly (just to give some sort of shield/block sort of effect - you could also jump on it but I feel it should be gravity affected and generally be far worse than platforms for this)
Some homing spells to unlock (if there aren't already) would be great, as well, especially since we know the engine can do it as the enemy has them.
Finally, some spray-shot spells, perhaps if Fireball or Ball Lightning upgraded to fire multiple balls with each tier? That has probably already been suggested at least once though, but generally if tiers did more than just make spells linearly better... or, perhaps, if there were some sort of extra upgrades you could add, so you could synth a super-long-range-tier-2 fireball, or a multiple-shots-tier-2 fireball, or an Area-of-effect-on-impact fireball... I realize that's very complicated, but I love tweaking around with systems like that and it would add tons of variety to each current and new spell, and only require one (big) chunk of implementation early on, hopefully. Yes, people could make broken combinations with it, but balancing mana costs and cooldowns would probably stop many of those and I think if people really want to 'break' it (it's often fun!), they will anyway.
Progression is a little weird, and I think the tutorial could make it clear that the missions will probably be too hard (at least on Hero!) right from the start, so building up some good enchants and upgrade stones via exploring is a good idea. It might be good to be led just a little more if you didn't skip the tutorial - perhaps one of the Illari should suggest you focus on building up a full set of enchants, by exploring buildings for stashes, or something like that?
Speaking of difficulty levels, I find Hero a bit over-challenging, with me only managing to defeat a couple of rooms full of mobs before having to return to be healed, and Adept a bit under-challenging, I'm usually on full health. I think it's because the difficulty seems like it's double- or even triple-dipping. Enemies are tougher, do more damage, seem to move and shoot faster, drop less health, and also take less damage, which combines to make the difficulty levels even more exponential than they already are. Perhaps a level in between Adept and Hero would be good.
Generally it is much improved, but there's still occasionally a bit of an empty feeling to it, which judging from the list of things to add before version 1.0, is already on the agenda to fix
There's still a bit of a problem in that it sometimes feels like a slog to progress, killing dozens of enemies to get to one stash, and then there's not a huge amount there, and you rinse/repeat a fair bit, but that might just be that I haven't played it enough yet... I suspect it could do with being condensed a little though - bigger rewards in larger chunks, fewer but tougher enemies, that sort of thing. In fact, maybe that should be a third set of options, to match the combat difficulty and platforming difficulty? (Game scale perhaps, running from Condensed / Quick all the way up to Epic?)
I hope this post is helpful in outlining my views on it as someone who is mostly new, certainly new to this version, and if I think of anything else or have more detail to add on one of these points, I will do so.
