Thank you for the feedback!
I definitely plan to spend some time cleaning up and polishing the combat, as I completely understand where you are coming from. I experienced similar issues on playtesting but could only tweak so much so close to submission time.
I tried to compensate a little bit by adding the health station between wave to allow players to take a couple hits without to much worry, but some of the special waves, especially with the chainsaw enemy, can still immediately wipe the player.
Thank you for playing and the kind words!