Some thoughts and questions.

[SteamMonkey]

Main question, where do I sign up for play testing? me and my partner have fallin in love with the game and I'd love to be able to help bug hunt and improve the game. That said, I have a few things I ran into. 

Bug?: When you have on Gnarlic armor you can body hop around and still do damage. I personally don't mind this, it's not perfect, you have to sort of time things right, but it's kinda funny to pull a Magikarp and Flail on baddies while your friends are actually doing normal stuff and at risk... however, it might not be intended and I could see it being somewhat exploitable. 

Weapons:
The Cannon... I really want to like this thing, but the lack of a dodge really hurts more than it helps. Also the fact that some of the attacks do damage to you feels like an additional punishment for really, not that massive of a gain. Sure it does a lot of damage but mobility is absolutely king in the game and there are so many things to keep up with on top of having pretty reduced mobility, it just feels like it could use some tweaking. I'd take a little less damage for the ability to keep my dodge. 

Striker: No notes, absolute blast to use, maybe a combo mechanic that makes damage build on a ball as long as it doesn't hit the ground, sort of a keepy uppy bonus, as it were.

Hammer: I love the variety of charge combos and stuff, if there's any feedback on it I'd say it maybe could use a tad more hit stun, maybe the third hit of a lights combo could have a bit of a stun without knockback similar to the spears special action. 

Spear: also pretty fun, feels well balanced. The raw heavy could maybe be a little faster, but the rest of the moves we found were super fun and utilizing the knock back to get range and the dash dive spin attack etc, all really fun and mobile. I personally liked to pair it with heavy armor because I could get additional mobility out of the dash attack but still benefit from the tankiness. 

Armor:
I LOVE the armor sets. The one main note I have is the healing heavy set was hard to really understand how it was working. Will do more testing on that, but it didn't feel like it was doing much of anything, especially the "heal and heal again" part. 

Abilities/Powers:
Generally most of the powers felt really fun and engaging, the 'ooh I hope I get X power!' feeling was strong and when you get a good combo that works with your gear, you feel like a total badass. 
However....
"+5 health" powers (both pick ups and on gear) feels... off. A lot of abilities, some armor, etc, offer +5 or +10 heal when you enter a new area. At even 1000 base health, and with how much 1 hit from a mob is... that feels pointless. I couldn't find myself picking a +5-10 heal item or ability over just about anything else. if it was like 25 and moved up from there, it might start to feel better. I'd maybe balance it around 1 average hit from a frenzy 1 tier monster and let it upgrade from there. Unless I'm missing some combination mechanics that make it actually useful. 

Difficulty Scaling:
Frenzy 0 (F# for now on), once you understand the game, felt relatively easy. I feel like I could do a base run on both maps without picking up any powers really. That might be a good base line, I dunno. It was kinda nice to just go in and mindlessly smash for stuff. F1 was a noticeable and welcome jump up in power. F2... that felt a little rough. I feel like I was getting way worse power options, less power clearing options, on top of the mobs becoming noticeably tankier and more dangerous/plentiful. If the power ups had stayed the same, I feel like it would have felt a lot better.

Art: No notes, it's absolutely amazing and you should give all your artists more money, basically all the time, and pizza or whatever they like to eat. The art is just perfect. The animations are so clean and they convey a real sense of momentum on the attacks and movement, the pauses and delays and pacing of how everything moves is just so good. But it's a Klei game, I'd expect nothing less on that front. 

Sounds: Also awesome, great music, great sound effects, good "impact" when needed, nice little weird ambient stuff going on, again, Klei always kills this so I'm not surprised but still super pleased. 

The Town: I'm REALLY looking forward to seeing where this goes. One thing I think I'd add would be a 0 damage 'enemy' training dummy. Something in a little area that you can practice your perfect dodges on to understand the timing. With the armor having different invuln windows on dodges, getting a base level feel outside of a run would be nice. It'd also be good to have a moving target that isn't going to kill you to practice on.

Random thoughts:
Treek teleporting through the portals needs to make it to release lol. It's fantastic. 

Are there plans to have the species be anything other than cosmetic? Would be neat to have some little +/-'s tailored around the three weight classes or something. Just a thought.

As soon as I got the light armor I immediately wished there was a dagger weapon that worked like this:
Focus Attack: Hit an enemy in the back.
Special Skill: Poisoned blade. Deals weapon damage X2 over 5 seconds, can stack 3 times. 
Would be very fast, very short range, almost no stun/knockback, and require a lot of mobility and mindfulness. light attacks form the front should be weaker than striker lights, attacks from the back, lights = spear, heavy = hammer, roughly.If possible, make the special skill do positional based damage as well. Weapon damage x2 would be higher from behind than in the front, etc. 

I'll reply with more info on the healing armor once I test some more tomorrow. 

Thanks for the demo, this game is fantastic, It might surpass my 1500hrs of DST a lot faster than it should when it comes out and it's going to be a blast to stream.