rush to the teleport. reach it fast as you can. don't go grabing/killing everything. rech the teleported, activate it, and then during the teleporter charge, try to get every item you can...

it's a risk vs reward. . . if you get perks then get the teleport you get more items to help out later. . . or you rush through with less items with weaker enemies. It all depends on what type of run you wat to do. Also yu unlock new items with each playthrough by hitting objectives. . . that's what is fun about the game.

The most important thing is not to stress about dying. It's a game where you die a lot - as you play you get used to some of the items and powerups, die, and start again. The items you unlock make the game easier and they are introduced gradually so you aren't overwhelmed. As long as you accept that dying is part of the game then the pacing is quite good.

The next thing to remember is that the difficulty starts out low and increases fairly rapidly as time goes on, so your best bet is to find the teleporter as quickly as possible. Don't waste time killing things until after you activated the teleporter.

thanks a lot, yeah thats why i love this type of games, im an old school gamer and am happy those type of games get back ;).

the only thing which bothers me is that you dont know how to unlock more characters? i dont wanna check a wiki normally but without ANY clue i dunno what to do :/

i heard from multiple sources that co-op is the way to go

Starting out is pretty hard but once you unlock different power-ups and chars it gets a lot easier.
Also co-op is decent but make sure the person who dies less is host so you don't get the dead monster bug thingy..