I'm really enjoying the game so far, it has taken me many, many runs but I have barely just beat the final boss with the simple Burrl ship. However, there's a few things I'm having issues with, maybe someone has some advice:

Is it just me, or are the majority of weapons completely useless? Same with ship abilities and items? The runs I tend to have difficulty with are ones where I ditch the regular single laser, machine gun, or ion splitter, and try to use something like a flamethrower, acid belcher, rainbow cannons, missiles, pretty much anything that isn't a one click, one projectile going straight forward. If it drains more than 1, maybe 2 ammo per shot, it's game over. I just have no ammo ever, and I'm sure my hit ratio is actually pretty good. The game where I beat the boss, I was just using the burst gun, and only because I picked it up right before the final mission, and I still ran out of ammo just shooting the boss core.

Aside from the ammo issues, I find these weapons to be very difficult to actually use in combat. Something like fire and acid seem to extinguish before they take out most ships, so you end up having to hit them twice. Even things like the charged ion cannon just end up having a big splash, but you still have to fire it many times even into a large mass of enemies and you'll still have to clean up with something else. Meanwhile it's eating through half your ammo for just one fight.

The same goes for a lot of items like deployable mines, seems like you have to work very hard to put enemies in a position where they'll get hit by them, whereas items like the armor repair kit are so valuable I'll just hold onto it all game until the final level.

I would be interested in experimenting more, but the two weapon limit (without lucking out on a specific upgrade) makes it very difficult. You have to be able to mine hundreds of minerals and gas every level, so one weapon has to be at least somewhat efficient at that, meaning your second weapon needs to be able to take out the big Deadeye ships efficiently, which the first weapon usually can't. So I feel very trapped into having a setup like Gauss Cannon + Chunk II, Machine Gun + Experimental Arrty (sp?), etc. Only when I get an all-comers weapon like Unknown Beam Weapon, which can take on pretty much all enemies and also mine asteroids, do I feel like I can experiment with some of the other weapons. But when I do end up experimenting with explosives, fire, acid, frost, etc, I end up dying to my own environmental or splash damage.

So anyway, just curious to hear if anyone else has had success utilizing the whole gamut of weapons, or is there a core few that you stick to?

TL;DR - Do I just suck with most of the nonstandard weapons and ship abilities? There aren't any gameplay videos out there besides a few of the typical introductions like Splattercat's, so I can't just watch some pros take on Surge level 8 or something to pick up tips and tricks.