So I deconstructed my scene until there was literally nothing in my scene but a particle emiter and a damned camera so I could see the frame rate on my phone. Sometimes you get a bug so obscure and counter intuitive you wonder if the gods above are trolling you. I revamped my entire input system, looked over every inch of my project, nothing worked. Turns out that my FX cam was the issue, a secondary camera I had that rendered only transparent materials because on the current render pipeline depth of field destroys these particles as z sorting is a fubar.

So I'm on track now, i've got just one camera in the scene, in an attempt to fix this I upgraded to the Universal render pipeline on a whim and after everything turned pink, I almost gave up on it immeidatly but I checked in AMplify shader really fast, and turns out it's relatively easy to swap to this new pipeline.

Set up some materials tried some post processing stuff, and it seems like it's a worthy upgrade, did a quick web build and it works. So random tangent today, I'll be upgrading the project to the new render pipeline and hopefully getting a nice snazy visual upgrade. Unfortunately I can't figure out distortoin so some effects are being lost, but some of the otehr effects are already looking better. Lighting as a whole seems superior and I'm optimistic i'll find a post process or two that'll kick htings up a notch, already the new depth of field works with particles so excited to get this all up and running to see what the game looks like in a few hours.

SO FUCKING GLAD to have sorted that fucking bug. Oh, and the game is playable as hell on the phone now.