Last year, i released my game Pharmakon :
http://store.steampowered.com/app/654660/Pharmakon/It was a game i made alone (except for the music) after 3 years of work. I was really happy to share my unique concept to the players and i hoped that they could enjoy it.
Having a pretty uncommon concept, the game was difficult to make the right way. Especially without a lot of testers.
So i made some mistakes that breaks the idea behind it and at the same time, breaks the fun of the player.
Breaking the fun of my players kills me. I mean, it's not even a question of money, it is litterally seing comments about flaws i didn't expected by the lack of testers or my mistake.
So, the more i get critiques about the flaws of my game, the most i want to improve the game but for this i need to make some major changes that could remove some content.
What do you do in this case?
listen to the people playing your game but don't take what they say at face value, and remember feedback in general has a bias towards the negative so you're more likely to hear the 10 people who didn't like something than the 100 people who did. If a lot of people say similar complaints though, it's generally worth researching into what the core issue behind them is (it might not be exactly what they're complaining about)
That said, here's my feedback, and unfortunately while your game does look like the kind of game I would be interested in playing (seriously, I have a FTL addiction..) you don't have a mac or steamOS version so I'm unable to purchase it. I'll have to go off of YouTube videos and screenshots, other feedback, and your own descriptions. So I guess this is less of actual feedback and more of a research paper based off of the feedback of your players.
1. Clean up your writing.
You have misspellings and grammatical errors all over your steam store page, and it looks like in game as well. I also see some pretty huge text walls in the game. You might want to pick over these and reduce them to a more manageable length for players, the longer the instructions are the less likely people are to read them.
2. A common complaint seems to be that basically what you see in the first battle is the entire game, and that the battles are so random you can get impossible situations right at the start. Part of what makes FTL and other such games so good is a difficulty ramp where, while random, each sector as you go forward has a basic difficulty allowing you to progress.
3. The positive reviews as well point out that there's practically no loss from death, making the game trivial to beat. That's pretty much the ultimate sin in a game like this, though I'm not sure how you could fix this at this point.
4. Pretty much all the positive reviews talk about how counter-intuitive the UI is, I would definitely say from the screenshots and videos it does look like it ignores common UI practices.
5. While I understand it took you 3 years to complete, for the price and for the short game with fairly shallow game-play It's going to taint your reviews strongly towards the negative. I would HIGHLY recommend lowering your price considerably or you're going to get a lot of negative reviews about how short and easy the game is. This is a common mistake I've seen in a lot of small indie games on steam, they price too high on release and it absolutely kills the scores for an otherwise fairly decent game, and you make FAR less in the long run from the reduced sales and high rate of returns.
My conclusion is that for your first game here you priced yourself out of your own market, at $9.99 it would be hard to justify picking up a game with a median playtime to completion under 3 hours, and an average under 45 minutes. At $2.99-$4.99 you'd be more in the impulse buy range, which is where you generally want to sit for shorter games. Outside of that a few fixes to the UI and cleaning up your text, and a tweak to your difficulty scaling and I think the game could have done quite well. At $9.99 you're no longer competing with the smaller indie titles but you're now directly competing with games like teleglitch/ftl/roguelands etc (which are all between $9.99 and $12.00). With the small number of reviews it might not be too late to salvage, you could test out a new price with a sale and then once you find a good setpoint adjust accordingly. (there's tools to plot how your sales trend according to price)