I've beaten the game twice. Playing through levels like Salamun District, Suljeva Village, The Cruiser, and Visari Hammer makes me question some of the gameplay criticism levelled at this game in the previous Idlehands podcasts.
Firstly,the turret complaints were over exaggerated. There are five situations in the entire campaign that force you to use a turret. Two in the intro level Corinth River, one on Salamun Bridge, one in Tharsis Refinery,
and the big AA section in The Cruiser. (On Elite difficulty, it's actually advantageous to avoid turrets as you need to stay mobile and move from place to place quite often in order to deal with the AI. Man a turret on that difficulty and you die very fucking fast.)
The rest of the time, turrets are completely and 100% optional.
Which leads me to my other point. The levels are typically laid out in a manner that gives you a lot of options.
There are almost always multiple entry and exit points in any given space and verticality is reinforced in just about every area.
The game constantly allows you to tackle a firefight from flat ground or higher ground. That's one of the reasons the firefights are so fun.
Not only is the AI very dynamic, just about all of the levels give you at least half dozen ways to approach the combat. Complaints
about the level layouts don't resonate with me at all. The map designs in the campaign allow you more freedom of movement than most linear shooters, certainly moreso than COD and Half Life.
The complaints about the storytelling and narrative and unambitious game design (blow up this pillar, turn this crank, defend this area,etc) are perfectly legit, but all the talk which implied that the game was putting the player in a straitjacket of total linearity (hey,COD style!) was fairly misleading. This game has dynamism in spades. Although I understand that somebody could miss out on some of it if they played the campaign on the default difficulty and allowed a directional pointer to herd them through the levels.
I'm blown away by anyone choosing to rely on object marker to find their way around a level.
Seriously? I played this game on veteran and Elite with no Hud whatsoever (not even a fucking crosshair), and I was able to find my way around most maps with little difficulty.
Lastly, I rarely felt burdened by the two weapon limit. It forced me to experiment with different weapons in different scenarios. You simply have to learn when to use the combat knife and when to fall back and rely on your pistol in tight situations. The two weapon limit encourages experimentation.