Thank you for the in-depth feedback! We're thrilled you liked the audio and visuals.
To clear up how the combat works: the missiles auto-shoot on their own, and you only need to click once if you want to prioritize a specific target which will be more helpful towards the second-half of the run. We'll definitely work on making the tutorial more engaging so that feature is easier to grasp right away.
As for the theme, it centers on figuring out what you can trust on the radar. The red dots aren't all hostile (some are just fish, or returning cargo that got hijacked), so you have to upgrade your systems to tell them apart.
Finally, we'd love to hear a bit more about your note on the 'number of lives' - were you referring to your total HP pool being too high, or the number of entities on screen?