Fly your tiny defenceless pod up to larger ships, dock with their airlock, and sneak inside. Once you're in, you creep through their corridors, ambushing guards, hiding bodies, stealing new weapons, blowing them up from the inside, or hijacking their turrets and even the whole ship.
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After having a blast getting all the achievements in the very fun defenestration simulator Gunpoint, I decided to have a glance at Suspicious Development's other games. The trailer for Heat Signature was one of the most immediately convincing trailers I've seen; it's no fuss, just a quick explanation of the design philosophy and why it's so fun! After starting Heat Signature I was hooked, despite not usually being a fan of the type of procedural game generation that's used. It proved to be a great game to pick up for short bursts of time, but over the past week I chose to try to beat the game and get all the achievements in one quick burst. While there isn't much to spoil, this review won't go into detail about any late-game mechanics: keep in mind that what you see from the first few minutes is what you get for the whole experience, just with added complexity and intensity!
While the core of the game is the same from start to finish, it never got dull, perhaps with the exception of many of the completely optional Defector Missions which are almost always incredibly easy and quickly become far more simple than any strategies you might employ in the main game - they always felt like a nice change of pace nevertheless. The variations in character traits, ships, and loot are enough that the game never felt stale. There are certainly some methods that might be much more effective: hijacking another ship makes assassination, capture, rescue, and steal objectives very easy in missions without clauses, while the slipstream+stealth shield combo remains incredibly effective all the way up to high Glory missions. However, I was always willing to play around with different builds and explore the uses of the items I found, especially I as neared the end of the game. Working around tough vows ended up being a highlight, although I rarely chose to choose characters with vows I had already completed, I would just pick missions with clauses with relative frequency.
Heat Signature certainly didn't need anything beyond a simple story, but the game's humour often shone, be it in the writing of item descriptions or the inherent humour in the ridiculous situations you get yourself into. All-in-all, the game is great, well-polished, and almost never frustrating if you're willing to take the road less travelled by having fun and not worrying about perfectly optimising strategies (the game felt so much more freeing when I started taking risks and more frequently retired characters). You'll get a lot of fun out of it, all at a rather low price tag. While harder missions often felt impossible starting out, the idea to tie game progression to the variety of available items in the store cleverly allowed tougher enemies, clauses, and ship designs to feel intimidating at the start of the game when you're still getting to grips and rarely have access to a consistent means of dealing with them, but just another fun obstacle by the time you've already mastered the game's systems. I certainly plan on returning to this game for a quick session whenever I need a fix of "live fast, die young"-style emergent gameplay.
Achievements that require Steam friends for single-player games aren't the end of the world, but can really annoy me!
While the core of the game is the same from start to finish, it never got dull, perhaps with the exception of many of the completely optional Defector Missions which are almost always incredibly easy and quickly become far more simple than any strategies you might employ in the main game - they always felt like a nice change of pace nevertheless. The variations in character traits, ships, and loot are enough that the game never felt stale. There are certainly some methods that might be much more effective: hijacking another ship makes assassination, capture, rescue, and steal objectives very easy in missions without clauses, while the slipstream+stealth shield combo remains incredibly effective all the way up to high Glory missions. However, I was always willing to play around with different builds and explore the uses of the items I found, especially I as neared the end of the game. Working around tough vows ended up being a highlight, although I rarely chose to choose characters with vows I had already completed, I would just pick missions with clauses with relative frequency.
Heat Signature certainly didn't need anything beyond a simple story, but the game's humour often shone, be it in the writing of item descriptions or the inherent humour in the ridiculous situations you get yourself into. All-in-all, the game is great, well-polished, and almost never frustrating if you're willing to take the road less travelled by having fun and not worrying about perfectly optimising strategies (the game felt so much more freeing when I started taking risks and more frequently retired characters). You'll get a lot of fun out of it, all at a rather low price tag. While harder missions often felt impossible starting out, the idea to tie game progression to the variety of available items in the store cleverly allowed tougher enemies, clauses, and ship designs to feel intimidating at the start of the game when you're still getting to grips and rarely have access to a consistent means of dealing with them, but just another fun obstacle by the time you've already mastered the game's systems. I certainly plan on returning to this game for a quick session whenever I need a fix of "live fast, die young"-style emergent gameplay.
Achievements that require Steam friends for single-player games aren't the end of the world, but can really annoy me!
A real sleeper hit for me. At first everything feels way stronger than you, then you learn to use your tools and suddenly you're dominating. Really makes you feel like you're getting stronger
This is a game I randomly return to and will play for maybe 30 minutes, but it's a great game for what it is. It is fun to play in the background, and the mechanics are all solid. I will say some of the UI is a bit unintuitive but it's made up for in the fun moment-to-moment gameplay.
When everything goes horribly wrong is when this game is best
Good fun early on. The perma death mechanic is a bit annoying, it would be great if there were harder defector missions. I would love a way to do heists on glory 5-tier ships without needing to grind a character all the way back to that point every time.
It's good until everything gets armor and the best strategy is to spam hacks from a distance or set a trap and wait for an hour for the wallhack guy to walk into it.