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Heat Signature review

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  • Heat Signature review

    In his review of Gunpoint, the first game from former journo Tom Francis, Dan Whitehead described the protagonist as a "flea in a trenchcoat" - springing through windows to administer dainty mouse-click beatdowns. To continue the theme, Heat Signature reminds me of those horrible wasps that breed by paralysing tarantulas, laying an egg on them and leaving their larvae to burrow into the poor creature, gobbling it up from the inside out. In this case, the tarantula is one of an endless series of procedurally generated starships, made up of cunningly stitched-together sentry gun chambers, hallways, keycard doors, fuel cell rooms and treasure boxes. The wasp is an unarmed but perilously agile single-seater pod, able to swoop across a twinkling 2D starfield and snap itself cleanly over an airlock in a matter of seconds.
    And the larva? That would be your character, a scruffy vigilante out to stop an interstellar war by killing or abducting each faction's captains, stealing technology, hijacking vessels, saving captives and, once you've done enough of the foregoing, flipping space stations (which serve as mission select hubs and shops) to your cause. Your tools in this noble endeavour range from some beautifully bizarre teleport doodads and time control devices to that essential instrument of peace-keeping, the wrench. The sum of these parts is a wonderfully versatile, chaotic, lo-fi mixture of house-breaking sim and space roguelike, muddled a little by some uneven performance. If insect metaphors make your skin crawl, think of this as a bunch of Hotline Miami maps flying around a galaxy and you're halfway there.
    Heat Signature is a game's worth of hectic anecdotes - precisely the kind of emergent storytelling bonanza you'd expect from a developer who once penned book-length accounts of feats of silliness and calculation in 4X strategy games like Galactic Civilisations II. As per fine Spelunking tradition, the best stories are often those in which you do something idiotic and must wrestle with the fallout. Here's a favourite: I've shot, stealthed and bludgeoned my way to the helm of a Sovereign battlecruiser, knocking the pilot the length of a corridor with my energy hammer, then downing my bounty with a concussion rifle when he moves to investigate. Having purged the ship of guards, all I have to do now is return with the body to my pod. Instead, I decide to be clever.
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