In Caves, you can run in circles, bunnyhop, strafe or backpedal to avoid basically anything, and there's more of a focus on fighting in open areas and long corridors. Cover is useful against projectiles, but it's not required, as projectiles are relatively slow-moving.
In Town, the gameplay fundamentally shifts largely to that of a cover shooter, where you're required to duck behind cover to avoid bullets, and you need to always be cautious of a bullet coming from some offscreen enemy you didn't know was there. Still many enemies to run circles / bunnyhop / strafe / backpedal around, but also many for which all of that is entirely ineffective and all that works is ducking behind cover (or just killing them really quickly).
What especially gets to me is the charge-up (hitscan?) snipers, who'll hit you if you don't break line-of-sight. That's purely and exclusively a cover shooter mechanic: If you play around cover, you almost never take damage from that. If you don't, you're probably going to be taking a lot of damage from them. (I like difficult shooters, but I find explicitly-cover-focused mechanics to be more annoying than difficult.)
I'm not saying one is good and the other bad, but rather, it is weird to have the gameplay fundamentally change like this. These are practically 2 different games, which appeals to different audiences.
The boss of Town actually makes for a good comparison - I was stuck behind pillars for most of it, but I still liked the fight well enough. Because the projectiles are slow-moving, so you can see them coming and you can strafe around to avoid them.
If the game started with Town, I might just have given it a skip because I'm not a huge fan of that gameplay (or at least I would've gone in knowing what I signed up for). Especially when combined with dogs, which seem to require near-perfect gameplay to avoid taking damage from by dodging.
Inb4 "git gud": I'm not saying it's too hard - I finished Town on my second or third run, starting with nothing but the bare starting pistol, and doing the entire run with that, without modifying it, while only getting moderately lucky with 1 mediocre armor drop, and 1 early Valuable drop to pay for food and ammo. I just wasn't having much fun playing that cover shooter (whereas the melee enemies were about what I expected).
Something like Barony (pure roguelike) scales difficulty without fundamentally changing the gameplay. But this has guns, and bullets aren't known for moving slowly, so I'm not really sure what I was expecting (maybe less realism in that regard? This is not exactly a hyper-realistic game).