Thanks a lot for the feedback, good stuff.
A bit more variety of enemies or missions, however, would help a great deal (I played about five and each one was "kill a cluster of about four Hives").
Ah, but level 6 is different

, you get the first capital ship that you have to protect and that can build stuff for you. And so are the following levels, maybe I should add another level like that to the demo.
I found the resource management initially interesting, but ultimately a bit irritating. The problem was that I could always get more resources by using the free gun against the small ships and I could always safely heal/re-build drones by flying just out of range of my enemies. Thus, I can always recover by following a rather tedious, but safe, set of actions, which reminds me why people use the life system - so it doesn't break up the action. Not saying that you should abandon resources, but that they do need some attention.
Again, resource management gets more important in the later levels where you build things.
And I guess that's the "slow and safe" way of playing indeed and I can't really prevent it, maybe have the enemy be more aggressive so that will follow and attack so you can only take a short break. And I had to leave the free gun as a last resort if you run out of resources, maybe I should make weaker. How about a scoring system where you get penalized for stalling much? Or resources start draining away?
I also used to have the Hp recovery be much more expensive and slow so running away and waiting did not help as much but I got players complaining about the difficulty. Try playing on hard maybe, see how it feels. But good point, I think I will bring that back the slow/expensive Hp recovery.
The drone formations didn't seem to do much beyond the aesthetic, like in almost every game I've played with formations, but that may have just been my perception of it. If they were arranged to shield/fire to specific directions (front, left, right, rear) it might make a bit more difference which one you chose.
Yes and no, the game can be played an won without the formations but it does make a difference if you use them, especially with the enemies in the later levels, for example the claw formation with the drones firing rockets can a destroy big enemy in seconds.
I don't have a problem with auto-aim, but I often couldn't easily tell what I was attempting to fire at, so I wasn't always sure if I was wasting rockets against chaff. Perhaps some sort of target indicator over what you are aiming at (if not for the drones' fire) would be nice, so I could at least try to direct fire a little bit.
Small point is that drone-laser is on S but your main laser is on V, which are differently aligned. It would make more sense to have lasers on S and F (which are on the same level) and have main mines on V.
Good point.