Love the blast effects. One critique is that it is really hard to see the main character with so many brighter splashes going on. Perhaps use a higher contrast pallet, or use a glowing outline? Would it be feasible to add a simple lighting to the player, so it lit up one one side with each flash of light?

You could use a few different null hypotheses here. One with minimal assumptions would be that the medians are equal. This can be tested using the Mann-Whitney U test. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann–Whitney_U_test