Thanks you for taking the time to write out your thoughts and feedback!
For your first point, we did in fact make the ice destroyable so that the player wouldn’t always just hold down the spacebar. Your idea of displaying a health bar of some type to prevent the accidental destruction of said pellets is a good one!
As for the randomness of the heatwaves and your meter, we are already implementing a way to lower your meter at will and possibly spawning enemies more closely associated with the strength of the upcoming heatwave, to give the player a fair chance of surviving it.
Thank you for playing, it is very much appreciated!