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!

After gunpoint I was excited about the next game from these devs. Sadly after about 30 minutes of gameplay I felt like I had seen all the game has to offer. I have beaten a few easy missions at first and found them to be absurdly easy. So I picked a hard mission and tried that. Was not difficult at all and I could proceed just as I did in the easy missions, just with more turrets and enemies. I am really disappointed to be honest as I was hoping for cool ways to intrude enemy ships without them ralizing, sabotaging their vessel and sneaking past enemies to fullfill my bounty. I feel like there is nothing like that in the game. Most enemies I encountered required me to deal with them as there was simply no way around them. Docking on to enemy ships was always the same procedure and not exciting at all. I did not find any way to sabotage any ship during my play time.

heat signature is a great game with a set of fairly simple mechanics that allow you to come up with a variety of creative and valid solutions to the problems that you are presented with. there's a lot to like about the game. however, the main issue is that the game doesn't really know how to balance the problems and the solutions out. dominant strategies can very quickly evolve and the game doesn't really know how to respond to them without making the whole experience less fun. the larger, more difficult levels can just feel tedious. which is a shame, because heat signature's gameplay is built on extremely solid foundations, are there are a lot of great moments. I think that if the difficulty had been more based around mission clauses (which there are already a lot of) than just giving every enemy bulletproof armour and a forcefield, then the experience would feel a lot better

You can see a lot of the DNA of their previous game, Gunpoint in here, but with a focus more on player expression. The game is designed to make you work with whatever wacky tools you have to try and clown your way through the map you are on to get to your objective, and early on especially, it succeeds at this. Problems arise, at least for me, when after you have played for a while, dominant strategies start to emerge, for example a slipstream and a stealth shield can get you through just about anything the game throws at you until you start dealing with the newer tech the game added to thwart it. Which sounds like a solved problem, but things like doors that disable tech and jammers tend to just shrink possibility space and encourage efficient play rather than expressive play. What I think might have served the game's purposes better would have been introducing elements more suited for other tools rather than turning the good ones off occasionally, but despite this criticism, I had a great lot of fun with this one and still occasionally come back to it when I want that particular kind of fun

One of the most enjoyable roguelike/roguelite experiences I've ever played. Solid short loops of gameplay with a long term overarching goal. Not overly difficult for a good while, letting you opt into difficulty as it raises up so you can level at your own pace.

Unlike Binding of Isaac or Gungeon or similar experiences, you're not committing 40+ minutes to a run; you can complete a ship VERY quickly and then be done with the game / set it aside for the day, if that's how you prefer to play.

Def a solid experience.