Until this mission I thought the game was sort of easy... and I was playing all mission on hardcore.
The missions got more and more challenging, and required more thinking, but were all doable.
This one however... I tried it so many times that I got completely angry on the game and ragequit several times
The only way I got through it was to step down to normal. (I haven't bothered retrying it on any of the higher difficulties again.)
I see the first tower as sort of a learning zone. Even though you know what the tower does you're still supposed to panic while traversing this first part. For example, even if you know that you are not supposed to use suit abilities where the tower can see them, this particular area forces you to use them in range of the tower... just so you can trigger the(after 10 playthoughs #¤%#¤% anoying) report telling you how the tower works.
What I did was to pick a tank. It has the highest armor and weapons don't matter much, since the towers will all respawn anyway.
Just run in front of the tank, use decoys and smoke for the first couple of towers, and then when the tank is being eaten up by the scorcher you have to use repair a lot of times, even though this will lead the energizer tower to respawn all the other towers. At the point where it respawns them, they won't really be a treat anymore because the tank will drive behind the building near the end of this start area.
On hardcore I run out of all my abilites, just like you do... but on normal you'll have just a bit left that will enable you to continue. I continued just adding a crawler to the tank, and then later a shield.
This game is an indie game, and even though this is the most complete and well done indie game I have ever seen, I think we must realise that they probably didn't spend as much time playtesting it as on really big productions.
It also becomes clearer on the later missions that can be quite a pain in the #"¤% because they are lacking checkpoints, and have bothersome voiceovers that can't be canceled even though you have heard them several times and just want to control your squad instead.
Therefore I think we must just accept to bump the difficulty down sometimes if a level is too tough.