Woooow!
Thank you for such a great, detailed comment and a lot of feedback.
Thank You for taking the time to play and think of all that.
I like the pathfinding turned out well. This was my first shot ever at creating something like this so I'm glad to hear it worked out well.
The basic premise I had for the game was tu run away from a horde of enemies while charging up to then destroy most of them with one charged attack. The kick was mostly added to destroy the crates and so that you would have anything other than the charged attack, but I purposefully didn't want it to be very useful against enemies, because I wanted the player to focus on the charged attack. So basically the best strat you described was pretty much spot on intended by me. Whether that was a good decision is another thing. Tho making the kick hitbox bigger is not a bad idea.
Once more thank You for the detailed feedback and actually playing the game for a while. I was not that haply with it so seeing someone sit through to get 250 points is wild. Cheers!