Maybe it's just a placeholder, but the handle on the scythe looks far too thin to support that blade. Could use a bit more heft

Blade looks fine to me, although it's hard to tell how close/far it is behind the character. Again I think a thicker shaft might help, and perhaps a shadow on the blade's underside (the light purple bit) could help.

he actually said "I think it looks worse than the castlevania games"

I think they meant the newer GBA/DS ones. I suppose you could say there's an argument there, although those guys should have seen more of the games than we have. It certainly seems that recent Castlevania games have been focusing quite a bit on the artistic aspect and it's going to take a good artist to match or top that

For my part, I think it looks great...you can tell right away that the SNES and NES sprites were used as general models. I didn't see a lot that you can tell comes straight out of Contra III, the item icons and player lives font come out of Contra III/Spirits, and I thought the jetbike (that water stage is reminiscent of Shinobi III, at least when viewing it!) and alien dog looked very close to their Contra III counterparts. I'm pretty sure the alien dog has been redrawn, seems to have some sinews standing out that I didn't remember from the SNES game. I could be wrong there.

Edit: In the interest of full disclosure, I'm the dude behind revamping the Contra HQ. I've been amped about this ever since I heard about the announcement (three days late). The dual-screen thing is a real challenge for action games and it's a pleasant surprise to see it handled so well - then again, I never had any reservations about the developer because I've actually had some experience with their products which apparently the "this sucks" crowd hasn't. This looks like it'll be even better than what we've seen before, though (not much of a fan of SSS, played a bit of it and then got thoroughly sick of the random ship battles)!