Heat Signature
As a fan of the brilliantly designed Gunpoint, when Tom Francis started showing off his new game Heat Signature a number of years ago I was immediately interested. It took a while and went through some design changes but when it was finally released I jumped on picking it up.
Heat Signature is top down mission based mistake simulator. You pick a character with a small starting load out of equipment and hop in your space pod and head out on mission. Then everything goes wrong and you try to recover. That's the basics of the game, you will often be under-equipped or under-prepared and head into situations that rapidly spiral out of control. Even though the game lets you pause at any point and swap and use equipment as needed it can be hard to keep things under control. With mission difficulties ranging from "easy" to "audacious" and "mistake" and other sub parameter requirements such as no kills or not setting off alarms even when you thing you'e got a handle on the situation one slip up and it can rapidly spiral out of control.
Let me give you an example from a recent mission :
The mission required me to rescue someone from a large ship. The dock was at the far end from the rescue target so I was going to have to work my way through the ship. The crew and guards on the ship were plentiful and had special gear that was going to make my job hard. Specifically some had energy shields that my weapon could not get through, and others had personal teleporters that would bring them to my location if they heard or saw me. I had equipment that could mess with some of them but not all. And I needed keys to get through the locked doors in the ship and guess who was carrying those keys? The guards with the shields. Also as soon as a guard saw me the alarm went off and I only had about 75 seconds to complete the mission before the ship docked and I would be captured.
So I figured there was no way to disable all the guards and I was always going to trip the alarm I decided to just run and gun it. During the first fire fight where I was attempting to dodge bullets (combat happens in slow motion) and disable their abilities someone shot an explosive container, blowing up a chunk of the ship and that blew me and a lot of the crew out into space. I had to remote control my space pod to pick me up before I ran out of oxygen. Then I realized the part of the ship that had my target in it had blown off and was spinning away. I flew over to it and had to bump into it to slow down the spinning, dock with it and then found that it was empty other than the person I needed to rescue and a guard with the key to their cell who had his shield up. I had to use my final key cloner (a ranged device that copies a nearby key), rush in grab the target and get out. The whole mission probably took less than 60 seconds to do, but with slow motion and pausing it was closer to 10 minutes in real time.
Heat Signature is full of moments like this. Fast and slow. Finding new crazy items such as teleporters with odd restrictions, key cloners, directional stealth shields, subverters and a host of weapons with varying properties. Most of these are limited use and so you ever on the hunt for more equipment (or money to buy equipment) to perform harder and harder missions.
On top of the mission based game there is also a larger arc of liberating the galaxy one base at a time and dealing with personal missions. All of this is played out in these bite sized play sessions that take just a few minutes to complete (or fail) and leaving you going "just one more!".
Heat Signature is a fantastic game, Tom Francis really knocked it out of the park. It's both really fun and quite funny (lots of the descriptions of things and missions will bring a smile). For $15 it's hard not to recommend.
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