I understand why you said that SSH is more like “seasoned”, because the game design itself relies too much on strong enemies to make the game harder, such as cowards, slobs, armored chicken, chickenaut, ufo chicken…
When they’re nonexistent then it’s easy.
When they exist, it makes harder.
But the problem, the game loves to spam those “strong” enemies and make the difficulty fluctuate to nearly impossible without dying/special weapons.
There should be some limitation of spawning those guys so the difficulty range isn’t that wide. After that, if necessary we could buff “weaker” enemies to compensate that.