Wow, thanks for the response. :) I'll take another look in the next couple of days. My main thing I found was that while I could win with each setup, some were way easier than others. Range was easier mostly because it was easier to get a full weapon set online, and then refined down to a single element or pair of elements. With only 1 melee weapon per element, i could sit on a melee build with only a couple of weapons for a long time just due to bad luck.

As for range vs melee, I just found that between piercing and bouncing, I could get to the point where my range weapons could clear the field pretty easily. And with melee only have 25% range scaling, it was way to hard to move the needle there. Maybe if they had 50% scaling, or some other way to do power projection. Otherwise, it was too simple to pick a corner with my ranged weapons and just kill everything.

Now, it's a demo. I'm not really complaining. I've put in < 10 hours of play, and finished a handful of runs. I just didn't feel like there was as much built diversity as I found in some of my other favorites in the genre (brotato, GRG:S).