by 
Tom Francis, of Gunpoint fame, has made a game with a unique twist on the roguelike genre. One of the reviews I read for Heat Signature started with “Tom Francis is quickly becoming one of my favorite humans, and I don’t even like humans.” It is quite good and I enjoy playing it enough that it has to go into Tier 1, but that’s not to say it is without faults.
There are a few aspects to Heat Signature that caught my eye. First, it’s set in space (sorry, Chezni) with Newtonian mechanics, and I’m a sucker for hard sci-fi space travel (even if I do love an FTL drive). Second, it has a Rogue Legacy style generation system, where you can either retire your old characters or commemorate them after death. Heirlooms can be passed down from character to character, unless you die in the cold void of space and lose all your gear (which might just show up on another ship in another life, much like the bones of Nethack). As you free more systems, you get more control over your equipment and which quests you take. Finally, it’s unusually open world. You can steal a ship and start a battle with another or use it to accomplish a more difficult mission. The number of things you can do continues to surprise me. This game is definitely worth your time/money.
That being said, there are three aspects which frustrate me. First is that though the number of things you do is quite varied, the core gameplay (boarding and taking a ship) doesn’t change much. The ship aeshetics seem to fall into only a handful of categories, which makes the ships feel a bit repetitive. I also wish it were possible to assault space stations directly, rather than throwing ships at them or waiting for enough “Liberation Points.” But, I mean, it was made by one guy – I can’t fault it too much for not having enough unique assets.
Second, the difficulty curve of missions has two significant barriers: shields and armor. These make taking harder missions almost impossible until you’ve gathered equipment (or git gud, I suppose). Shields and Armor are impenetrable, and for many enemies are permanently activated. For Shields, the only direct way to bypass this is a Subverter or Crash beam. The trouble here is that these items are either single use (with up to 5 charges) or only rechargeable once you return to a station. By itself, this isn’t the worst – except harder missions might have 15-50 enemies with Shields. This is made worse because you can also cheese this by using your rechargeable items, returning to a station, then flying back to the ship. I think it would be far better to just have the items recharge slowly in a special room in the ship you are assaulting, rather than requiring a trip in the middle. I think it would have been a better choice to either limit the missions you can take with many shielded enemies until you have access to better items or to make self-charging items less rare. Yes, it takes away from the sense of progression, but the chore of returning to a station five or six times to recharge your devices is even worse. There are also many more creative ways to deal with these, but none of them lessen the barrier to the otherwise standard difficulty curve.
My final niggle is influenced by the Pillars of Eternity game series (and for that matter, FTL). A major component of Heat Signature is the ability to pause gameplay at any time. The trouble here is that it’s not particularly easy to pause the gameplay at the time you want – for example, when a weapon reaches its cooldown. I too often found myself holding down the attack button (which slows, but does not stop, time) while waiting for a weapon cooldown or for an enemy to round a corner. The trouble with this strategy is that it can be difficult to pause at exactly the right time – and 100ms can be the difference between success and failure. Pillars of Eternity handles this well by providing a plethora of auto-pausing options, which allow fine-tuned control of your combat. Admittedly, this may be a personal preference more than a true complaint since I don’t like reaction-based games (because I’m bad at them). In the end, I solved this by dual-wielding short-cooldown weapons – so it’s also possible this was a lack of gameplay understanding on my part.
Heat Signature is a fantastic game. Some parts are frustrating (mostly the invincible enemies, but I also wish there was a way to heal the permanent damage your character takes), but overall it can provide hours of fun and remarkably emergent gameplay. I highly recommend this Tier 1 game.