Bet you thought I forgot
Now first of all, yes Heat Signature is by no means a new game. In fact, rather like Tyranny, this is actually quite an old title that had it's heyday and is just bouncing around the ecosystem right now, but I remembered it. Back in the days when it was popular, I remember seeing people play it and thinking 'Well this looks fun', so I just slapped it on the back of the ol' Steam Wishlist and forgot about it. Well, fast forward all these years and I ended up picking up in a desperate attempt to keep that list out of the three digit threshold. (Of course, then I just found more games to go up there and I'm currently looking at 96. Someone help) So was the game quite as good as I remember? Living up in terms of content and delivery? It's hard to say because the game came out so long ago that I don't actually remember what I thought of it. But seeing as how I'm recommending it to you right now, there must be something right, no?
Heat Signature is essentially a game that forms itself around the premise of endless randomly generated heists. That's about as simple as I can put it. Heists in randomly generated layouts with randomly generated enemies where you have to acquire randomly generated loot in order to pull things off. Now, that isn't to say that the game is strictly stealthy, but at least for beginners stealth is recommended because going loud requires great amounts of strategic planning and heavy understanding of the systems and tools you can manipulate to your advantage. Oh, but there's a little something about the premise that I forgot to explain; like how it all takes place in freakin' space. Yes, the heists you're pulling off take place on spaceships travelling across the cosmos, meaning that one slip up can end with you getting shot and tossed off into the vacuums of space. So the stakes are pretty high.
As you can likely make out from looking at a little gameplay, Heat Signature is presented in this topdown hand-drawn presentation which just about conveys what the premise is, but isn't quite the best of it's kind that I've seen. (In particular, some of the more messy environments tend to hide important objects) But I'd still argue that the style holds certain charm to it. Although, if you're looking at it and thinking 'this looks like a really simple game' then allow me to assure you; the simplicity is just the barebones illusion that gets you through the door. Like all great games, Heat Signature gives you a very simple setup with dynamically evolves into a much more involved and, at times, even complex gameplay experience the more you become familiar with it. Though never, I'm happy to say, do things get too overwhelming, at least from a systems perspective.
In the game you star as a Mercenary, set off to do jobs against three warring factions for profit and glory. (I'm not sure if this explains why you're so much more capable than the people on these ships, but there it is.) Essentially this means you'll be manning a pod through space and locking onto airlocks before sweeping room-to-room through randomly generated, but still conceptually similar, hallways in order to wipe out guards, collect keys, and rescue the hostage, or steal the prototype, or hijack the ship or assassinate the target. (As I said, very simple) Where things get really interesting is with the gameplay because, through some trick of reflex, the entire world will freeze, but still be interactable, whenever the player enters their inventory menu allowing for strategy to be made up on the spot and allowing for crazy moments of on-the-spot badassery.
For example; You might walk into a room with 4 guards who all notice you. Well Metal Gear logic dictates that they need a couple of slow-mo seconds to really process and attack you, during which you can pause time and strategize. Attacks have a cooldown, so in those split seconds you can stab one man and then shoot another. As Gaz once told Soap "It's quicker to switch your weapon than it is to reload" so you can then pull a backup gun to shoot another guard. But then you're stuck, with but a handful more milliseconds until this turns loud. So you use your forever-on-person item teleporter to warp the firearm of someone you just killed to your hand in order to finish off the last guy. All that might have taken 30 seconds to play out, but thanks to pausing and the way the world works, it was just under 2 seconds of ingame time; and now you're starting to see the simplest point from which this game builds itself.
Because, you see, as you progress further you'll meet ever more complications and receive ever more cool tools to play around with. Enemies will start wearing bodyarmour, which traditionally requires an armor piercing weapon to take down, (Which can be rare) some may have heat sensors around their vicinity preventing them from being snuck up upon, other's have emergency shields which deflect all damage and activate quicker than it takes them to process danger. Other's have shields that are always on. All these complications are what give the game this appeal and justifies the innumerable gadgets at your disposal. And this is where I started to fall in love with the game, because all these items have such a robust function that their utility becomes dynamic in that manner that we seek after in our video games. The Crashbeam, for example, shuts down enemies shields allowing them to be killed, but it also shuts down all electronics in general. This means that you can turn off turrets, disable heat sensors and, should you find a room too daunting, even be used to bypass a locked door. Then there's the Subverter which allows you to turn turrets against their owner, or to invert shields so that when a enemy spots you and shoots they just off themselves. There's also the Swapper which switches the player for anyone within the vicinity, allowing you to jump through walls and bypass security checkpoints, or to swap with a character currently shooting at you so that they get hit with their own bullet. The possibilities are endless!
And what makes this all so 'pick up and go' is the rouglelite element to it all. You see, characters for Heat Signature are all randomly generated too and come with incredibly fragile bodies, in that they go down to a single hit and will die if injured too often. (Non lethal guns don't wound, fortunately) This makes all the split-second strategizing and off-the-cuff trickery just all that more intense, knowing that you might be a second away from death at any moment. This also allows you to have different 'builds' with different characters. (Because tools are so versatile that even keeping two different from another character can completely change up how you play the game with both of characters.) The only weakness of this aspect, in my eyes, is the trait system which echoes what you might expect out of 'Rogue Legacy' or something. Only, even the most substantial traits don't feel as involved and subversive as random traits might in other games of this style, and so you'll mostly be creating your own stories for characters in your roster.
Ingenuity doesn't just spark in the way you use your tools, however, it works it's way into the core design of the gameworld. The developer (Because as far I can tell this was made by one guy) put in just enough robust systems for you to get really creative with the way that you handle situations and it can make dynamic moments feel euphoric. There are windows which can be shot out to in order to suck everything into space for that split second before the emergency airlock kicks in. (Great for a quick getaways, given that you also remotely control your escape pod to pick you up in the seconds before you choke to death.) Certain floor tiles have fuel lines which, if shot with a lethal weapon, will destroy that entire room of the ship. (Destroy the right rooms in the right places and you might even manage to blow a ship in half, a great strategy if you're being hunted by special units that you just aren't equipped to deal with.) There's even special conditions to certain missions, such as one wherein the ship is travelling through a warzone and will get shot to pieces as you progress, really stretching extent of your abilities to improvise as you work your way to figuring routes and adapt to rising adversity.
As you can likely tell from the fervour with which I attacked these aspects, there's just so many clever little systems in this game all shaking hands that it's difficult to cover everything. A lot is just what you can figure out with the tools you have at hand, and making opportunity from adversity. (Like the time I accidentally started an assassination mission where the target had a shield and I had no crash tech. Luckily the void of space isn't so forgiving, so I could lure them to a window and blast them out it.) There's no end to the amount of incidental stories you can make up from playing this game and it's gotten to the point where Heat Signature has literally become my 'pass the time' title for when I'm otherwise occupied, which is quite the honoured position in my library. So I absolutely recommend you pick up Heat Signature, especially given how inexpensive the title is being a little indie game. A worthy reminder that sometimes you don't need complex branching narratives and wide open worlds, sometimes a game just need to be a game for magic to happen.
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