I read the negative reviews about the game grinding on and thought, "hey, I actually like grinding, and it can't be too bad right?". I fell victim to my hubris.
The game is fun and snappy- at first.
But the 'redo every kill' thing gets really obnoxious when there's seemingly only one enemy pattern, which at least comes out of different entries- but on a single map, that's only of moderate size. And I find myself just hugging the same sections for the cover more often than not.
I've never had one or two minutes *take so long* in a game ever.
It's mind numbingly easy after you get the hang of it, but then that leads to complacency, and you get picked off by a single attack. I am literally being bored into messing up and dying while on the way to the cool new bits, repeatedly. I thought I would be able to lock in and power through, but it's just that bad for me.

It's the speedrun (without the speed) kind of grinding, not the roguelite kind of grinding.
Definitely not for me, unfortunately. If I could at least skip a little more of it each time, I think that would do wonders. Or increased enemy variety. Or more maps.
This would be anti-arcade, but there already IS progression, it's just horizontal mostly, with your gear, and I don't think that changes it up enough. That's something you set beforehand.
But before even 2 hours it feels like playing Bloons if you had to manually click on every bloon passing by to throw a dart at it, and then do all the waves again every time you miss one.

Simple done right

This game friggin rules.
Brutally difficult, but the snappy, sharp combat mechanics make you want to give it another run as soon as you get killed.
I wish I could pay $20 to get a bigger game with more stuff to do, but it is easily worth the list price of $5 for the gameplay and content that is offers.
Hope to see more similar games from this studio asap :D