Yeah, I won (with level 8)! You should explain the controls somewhere... at least in a textfile packed with the exe.

I think what your game misses is the "competition" based on meaningful decisions. It makes neither no difference to attack the enemies in a special order nor to do something else as button smashing.

I use XNA, too - nice framework :)

Cool little game, decent graphics and sound... A little bit on the easy side.

But my hand was hurting halfway through :-( maybe you should make a single button for hitting, or maybe accept "hold down" as multiple hits?

I like it! Reminds of an action version of desktop dungeons, like a mini dungeon crawler with fast progression. As Jeremias and Caranha said, I'd remove the button mashing aspect and replace by a 'hold down' alternative, and yes, definitely some more elements to expand on the decision making aspect - either on the long run term (like some powerful magic attack that takes time to recharge) or something embedded into the gameplay, like monsters having a certain attack rate that you are able to predict and dodge at the expense of breaking a growing damage combo attack you are making... Anything to make it less linear!
On the bright side, this IS a finished game that makes sense from beginning to end, which some sort of organic balancing (something many games didn't manage to have, specially in the 48 hours category). Congrats, I'd love to see the idea expanded and developed!

Fun game, although it was a little easy. But balance is a thing for after LD!

can't run as I don't have a windows box and XNA4 doesn't run on linux under WINE

Very simplistic, somewhat enjoyable, I appeared to have confused exp with HP, so I died pretty quick. Well done.

Yikes, my hand is tired now. Pretty fun little button-mashing roguelike. :P I agree though, some explanation of the controls would have been nice (did mana do anything?)