Cool arcade shooter! Overall, the look and feel of the game is impressively polished, with some fantastic pixel art and great retro audio. The controls are rather novel in using the mouse for movement, and while the gameplay is a bit basic, it makes for some decent fun in blasting all sorts of guns while zipping around.
I gotta admit though, as nice as it is, I didn't find myself wanting to stick with the game too long. There were a few issues that got in the way:
*The difficulty curve is a bit too spiky and awkward. The first few levels are super boring and easy which makes replaying tedious, and then suddenly around level 4 a new shooter enemy type is introduced in a large number and it just feels overwhelming. You'd think that maybe the shooter enemy would be introduced in an earlier wave in a lesser quantity to build up to it slower. It's pretty hard until around level 7, then suddenly the difficulty dips down to being very easy for quite some time!
*To add to this, once you get to the later waves, it feels like once you die, you're screwed: recovery is way too difficult that you may as well just quit and start over. Reminds me a lot of games like Gradius which suffer the same thing: losing all your upgrades on death and having to grind them up is impossible when the game has gotten so hard.
*I don't understand the reason behind continues: your score is reset if you use them, so what's the point since going for a hi-score is the entire reason for the game? It'd only make sense if this game had a goal beyond scoring.
*Aiming with WASD felt really unintuitive for me. For some reason, I kept aiming to just the right and left since trying to aim diagonally and up/down was too much. As novel as mouse movement is and how much I enjoyed the challenge of getting used to it, I feel like movement with WASD and aiming with mouse would be a lot better.
*Because the game doesn't lock the cursor, I kept getting screwed over by my movement getting suddenly halted when my cursor left the screen momentarily. This happened even on fullscreen! I tried to avoid it as much as I could, but when the later levels get so hectic, it's unavoidable.
*Bit of a bummer that there doesn't look to be any high-score table integration with Newgrounds.
It definitely has a lot of potential and I wanna love it, but it was hard to so at times! Still had a good time overall, though.