Let me just start by saying this game is very complex. Enemies spawn in waves of 2 to 5 (or 1 unique type) in a set lane and then will cycle out to a new lane. You can get hearts, upgrade your weapon, get a slow-time useable item, or get a score bonus. You fly through until you complete the level and then continue to the next level with base upgrades. There are 3 "biomes" and 3 levels per biome, making for 9 levels total.
The most threatening enemy is the type that shoots an aimed shot at the player. There are a few methods that can be used to evade the shot, but the player hitbox is so large and the shot comes out so fast that you are likely to just get hit and die anyway. You can try to pre-emptively bait the attack one way then strafe the other, you can try to just move up and down while sitting at the edge of the screen, or the most effective method I found, simply get up near them and shoot them before they can fire. The problem with this method is that unless you have a weapon upgrade, the inaccuracy of starting weapon might cause your shot to miss and you'll get shot with little hope of evasion.
At first I thought the slow time mechanic was unusable, but it is actually decent if you use it in advance and strongly over-correct during your movement (because as I said your hitbox is enormous, actually larger than the on-screen character it seems). Be wary though that holding down slow time long enough will consume all your uses. The main way to use it I found is occasionally multiple waves will spawn, and if the tracking shot enemies spawn in multiple waves, you'll want to shoot them very accurately so this might be a decent time to slow time. There isn't much variety in enemy type across biomes as most of them are reused, and the bosses are just slight variations of each other. The first boss fires a long line attack which you'll want to sit back in the center lane and then veer strongly up or down to dodge. The second booss does the same attack, but it has also added in a new attack which fires in a three-way fork pattern. It is mostly trivial to dodge provided you aren't lined right up with him (although the first boss will train you to do just this). He alternates these attacks in a predictable pattern.
The final boss only uses the three-way fork attack, but it comes with the additional challenge of bubbles that appear in the arena and try to kill you while you're fighting him. I didn't die here at all because I'm not a scrub. Unfortunately I didn't have to replay the whole game just to earn the final achievment.
I would have to say that "Plasma Attack" is a complex game and fairly challenging (Hardly learnable at all) pattern-based game that any player can attempt to beat, but even a veteran SHMUP player will likely die and experience some frustration because the ways in which the game kills the player often feels unfair and unavoidable. There are not very many patterns to learn, and the gameplay can feel very slow at times just to get to the next biome. You do have to restart completely if you die, but frankly after the first play-through there doesn't really feel like much incentive to keep going.
Plasma Attack is priced around ~0.50 USD right now (1$ at full price) which I do think is a complete steal if it weren't such a frustrating experience. Increase player hitbox, speed up attacks to increase challenge and increase enemy pattern and variety to compensate the difficulty in more interesting and engaging ways. Also why is the starting weapon inaccurate?? All this does is create artificial difficulty and make the player heavily dependent on random weapon upgrades appearing each level. I rate this game 5/5, great experience.
Lolwut: Did the DEVS have the budget to update their "Cover art" after the purchases? That 1.20$ sale budget we gave them was too much. The cover art looks cooler than the game now.
