The point of roguelikes is to be constantly bombarded by waves of enemies that slowly progress in difficulty.

The difficulty can be swayed by active or passive abilities and upgrades, most with alternative permanent counterparts that can be bought over time with an additional currency that is collected aside from the "experience" collected during a run.

The point of "experience" being the main currency available during a run that provides your temporary upgrades and abilities.

Often times, additional lives can be gained to extend a run and are usually used to fight off unfortunate situations that couldn't be avoided.

This mod is missing key parts of any roguelike purely because they weren't implemented in a way that provides the look and feel for the type of gameplay that roguelikes provide.

Every death can be attributed to being slowed and subsequently swarmed.
The only way to combat the slow would be to invest in movement+ upgrades that quickly become an investment with diminishing returns and usually result in being swarmed anyway.

Altering the functionality and scalability of follower bots, turrets, and nearly every upgrade needs a hard look to improve this scenario overall and will be a huge factor in playability. I'd recommend looking at certain changes, provided they can be implemented at all.

Extra lives:

The whole point of an extra life is to return you to full health, and sometimes they provide temporary immunity so you can regain a foothold and resume the run.

Upgrades:

Placing the upgrades on a custom research table that pauses the game and opens once you've "leveled up" or collected enough "experience(coins) will increase the playability of this mod dramatically.
Removing the loss on death from most upgrades. (This is only needed because of how "extra lives" are currently.)
Adding permanent upgrades that can be bought between runs with an alternative currency.

Gameplay:

• The movement speed modifier applied by hits can be too muc, especially in later waves. I'd recommend creating a gradual increase in this speed loss while also implementing ways to reduce the debuff effect and time via upgrades.
• Having the next-life progress entirely dependent on items that are left on the ground and picked up later is a pretty primitive implementation of a working system in my book, and it can create a massive amount of unwanted clutter on the ground. (This can be avoided by implementing the research tree stated above.)
  The clutter stated above becomes increasingly dramatic if the items are dropped due to a full inventory. (This can be avoided by implementing the research tree stated above.)
• Follower bots should have one or both of the following recommendations implemented since the follower count+1 is currently useless while these functionalities are active since their related abilities cannot be scaled.
• Have their duration extended or removed.
• Be immune to damage.
• Turrets should have an ammo type and count upgrade functionality implemented to increase their scalability.
  Most issues I see with other abilities are that their AoE's currently do not scale as much as they need to or do not at all, which is a highly recommended balancing change to make.

All in all, I was excited to see someone throw a roguelike-oriented scenario into the game, and I enjoyed it for the most part. Even though, over the course of 4-5 hours, I was never able to get more than 10 minutes into a casual run, no matter the strategy.
The main reason could be that I was solo; however, I believe that a scenario like this should be mainly balanced around playing solo since it is roguelike after all.

:/