Heat Signature

There’s nothing cooler in Heat Signature when you up against extreme odds and five seconds of in game time takes five minutes of pausing, planning, and executing in slowed time. You throw your wrench against the wall so the guy behind a locked door opens it. Then you pause. Switch to your sidewinder teleporter to get through the now open door. Pause. Teleport your wrench back to you. Shoot your silenced concussive gun at the one guard down the hall then run up and slice up your target before they even know what happened. Then shoot the window and jump into space.

Moments like that are the core to Heat Signature. They’re tense and exhilarating. And, unfortunately, not super common. Most missions either you breeze through or fail. Failure in this game can be pretty brutal. Often one mistake means you’ll have to abort the mission or can no longer play as that character. When you’re just starting out and don’t have access or know-how of certain equipment, this feels frustrating or too luck based. “Wait. Why’d that happen?” and “Oh… I don’t actually have anything that can deal with this right now.” Were phrases I muttered frequently until I better understood the game.

This is a game that some folks will undoubtedly love. It’s has solid computable mechanics that utilize AI randomness well, fantastic but unintrusive writing, interesting emergent storytelling, and an endless amount of procedural content. However, I found the learning curve to be too steep and the game didn’t really click with me until about 6+ hours with it. I wasn’t really expecting or have time for another 20+ experience to actually complete it.

My chief criticism with Heat Signature is its structure. There are persistent upgrades that you unlock, but with each character you’re constantly cycling through overly easy missions only to get to more difficult missions and probably die, or mess up and need to abort. You’re constantly getting set back to much less interesting content.

However when you can pull of those harder missions, it’s amazing. Some of the best gaming moments of 2017. The highs are SO high that I wish I was more excited for the game as a whole. If only it were a compacted 5 to 10 hour game with more of a focus on the emergent story mechanics. As of now, it just feels a bit too grindy and long.

The game does have missions called “defector missions” where you play a one-off character with specific gear. They are probably the best parts and are a great way to learn how the game wants you to play it. Example: I had one that started me outside of the target’s ship with no pod and too guns with limited ammo. I had to shoot backwards to push myself to the ship, get on board, slaughter everyone, and steal the ship. It was rad. But the best thing about those missions is that you can restart them at any time. Failure in them is not much of a set back, other than the ship’s layout being completely different.

As of writing this review I put about 9 hours into this game and liberated one of the four enemy strongholds. I don’t think I’ll be putting too much more time into this game. I like it, and it will likely have a fanatic community around it, but it’s just not quite what I was looking for.

If you’re looking for a good game to play with a podcast on, action-puzzle-like game, or something that you chip away at over months, then Heat Signature is a pretty solid choice. If you’re looking for something more focused, then maybe look somewhere else.