Played the Steam version's hard mode, and it turns out that cranking up the damage you do, and making it so that you die in 1-3 hits makes the game a lot faster paced and a lot harder. Would definitely recommend it, but only after playing the game once normally.

It greatly boosts the amount of kudos you get naturally too, so you don't have to worry about the ranking system too much. Though it's not very fair for me to knock the ranking system when I didn't engage with it too much.