I've been playing a few shooting-based games lately. Iconoclasts, obviously, where you shoot, run, fight bosses, talk to NPCs and solve some puzzles. Flinthook, too, where you shoot, zoom through levels, shoot again, explore, die, repeat in another ship. And Owlboy, too. I'm ashamed I haven't posted anything about that one for so long, as I've been waiting for it since around 2015!

And with the mix of all these, I start to better appreciate the way feedback information is conveyed in those games. I'll use Iconoclasts as an example of how it can be made right. Granted, they somewhat overdid it, but they allowed player to immediately know whether they picked the right action and to reduce the feeling of the game being unfair to them.
There are 3 main weapons in Iconoclasts plus a few alternate ways of attacking monsters. And frequently some monsters are vulnerable to some weapons and shielded against others. The feedback here is pretty simple: a small red skull moving away from the monster denotes a successful hit while a blueish cross indicates that the monster blocked our attack.

This convention is applied game-wide, from the smallest critter to final bosses, and they work even though most our shots create pretty huge explosions. To some extent, this work a bit the same way than the "blocked", "hit", "severe hit", "missed" etc. statuses and damage numbers  that got shown in action-RPG games, but more integrated into the ...