Yeah, and this was my feedback in the form of commenting on someone else's feedback. I'm sorry if my comment sounded like "shut up, your opinion is meaningless". I just wanted to underline that it's important that both sides (he and people providing feedback) pay attention to certain things. As a dev aiming at a certain niche MasterM has to be careful about what feedback he takes seriously and people providing feedback have to be aware of their responsibility too.

I should revise my previous statement - of course I do blame devs for what seems to be mistakes (as a matter of fact I do it a whole lot), but I always try to tell actual mistakes in gamedesign apart from design decisions that I don't like but may satisfy others, especially those that care more about the whole game and who the game was probably aimed at.

But I apologize for my previous post, it not only didn't come out right, I had not given enough thought to it and it was partially based on wrong presumptions. I'm just overly sensitive when it comes to this aspect of designing a game because I've observed lots of projects, most of which failed because of mistakes done when dealing with feedback.

And that's the really tough part. In my experience often the people providing feedback are just as much to blame for a failed project as the developers themselves - especially in case of small projects when devs only get feedback from a small group when every bit of input they receive is highly influential. But as I said, I take back my comment on your feedback.

Here's some comments on the gameplay ideas you described. I'm mostly trying to point out things you'd have to pay attention to. Hope it doesn't sound like I'm completely full of myself, I'm really just trying to provide as professional advice as possible (but without contributing ideas of my own).

Love the "kickass" part, don't like the "lots" part. It's important you focus on making every weapon special and useful - it's easy to end up with weapons that are too gimmicky in nature to really contribute to the whole game. This may result in wasted work/time - it's always better to have fewer but well-designed weapons. Sure, crazy is fun but mixing "crazy" with "useful" is what makes features brilliant.

Be careful with that. As lowyhong has already pointed out this may encourage "hoarder's mentality". People tend to save credits waiting for a bright "this is the correct moment to get this item" sign, ultimately missing out on some good features or at least avoid them for too long. Additionally many players may focus so much on searching every corner for every credit that they get bored and dislike the game - "but I am not forcing them to do boring searching" is an argument often used by devs but it's usually just wrong. If your reward system ("more guns!") encourages boring behavior many players will bore themselves and they will blame the game (= you) for this. It's hard to include this kind of feature and really make it contribute to the game so plan it well.

Another potentially very enjoyable feature with a high risk of causing frustration or boredom. The question is how confusing the game potentially gets, whether it supports too much backtracking through secure areas etc.. This "different paths/sectors" idea sounds interesting but frankly I'm highly skeptical, it would require a great concept to make it work properly. The way I get it the three paths are defined by their ratio of difficulty/time but I don't see how that serves the game unless less time spent on the level is rewarded - and if it is rewarded, won't be the short but hard "military" way always be the preferred one rendering the other ones practically disposable?

Here's some examples based on different player types that may further explain my concerns:
Speedrunners appreciate different paths with different lengths but they prefer if they have to analyze the level in order to find the most efficient one - the way you describe it the paths will be marked (by using the themes such as "military") which trivializes this aspect and reduces their efforts to executing the run.
Explorers will not recognize the paths, they will treat them just as more areas they have to visit and always pass all three routes anyway and the amount of connections between areas resulting from the model will make the exploration more difficult and potentially tiresome.
Regular players, especially less observant ones who are mostly in for the action are at risk of getting confused by the path model. They may end up circling around, go through one of the paths the "wrong" way while thinking that they are making progress only to find themselves back at the entrance to the path they chose originally - frustration.

Obviously I'm not saying that the path system cannot work but as I said - something's missing so far, something that would raise the impression that this system is really beneficial.

A feature I personally like a lot. It has the potential to create some really intense emotions but I'd try using subtle tricks to make it easier than it appears. The real challenge is to give the successful player the feeling that he barely made it without making these sequences too hard. Also: what is the punishment for failing at this point? What portion of the level/game has the player to repeat?

Sounds okay, some games did this kind of thing and it worked, but without more details about the top-down sequences it's impossible to say anything more. The feature needs some good ideas to in order to be justified - think of ways how to make good use of the change of perspective. Include things that won't work in FPP.

Great. :D