Heat Signature

Alert, the game was not made/meant/design/considered for people with impaired vision or with consideration of high resution monitors, you cannot zoom in the UI.

10/10.

Defenestration Studios (Suspicious Developments) only makes incredible games. Cannot recommend enough

Great game! Little warning, though: The late game missions get ungodly hard to the point that I think a significant percentage of them are just not possible for someone who also happens to play other games or isn't modding Heat Signature. I get that the missions that remove entire factions from the map are supposed to be hard. It's just that with concerning frequency, you get a mission where EVERY enemy has a permanent energy shield. Your options with dealing with energy shields are very limited unless you get absurdly lucky and manage to get a self-charging subverter or crashbeam.

Hecka fun.
Was skeptical at first. The bird's eye view. The seemingly simplistic gameplay mechanics. Once I gave it a couple hours I found this to be quite a challenging game. Appropriately rewards clever, thought-out plans. Lots of crazy things can happen in this Sci-Fi Stealth game.

Worth every penny. It is a great sneak-about game.

Fantastic game

Can't reload a fucking save at all

i didnt know what a 'liberation' mission was and accidentally killed my first character by crashing into an enemy starbase. was pretty sick, would commit cataclysmic warcrimes again

I like watching them suffocate

My only regret is not buying it sooner.

Absolute hidden gem. Super satisfying gameplay with crisp 2D art

Good fun

It is so fun and really unique.

Some of the achievements are impossible to get without a steam friend who also plays the game. That being said, I wish there were a continuation to the game; a Heat Signature 2.

Throw yourself in the airlock. Throw everyone else out the windows.

Fun game. Wish I could manually put together a character in terms of the passive buffs/debuffs to try fun combos and make my own challenges, but that's just an endgame problem. Lot of fun, maybe wait for a sale since it's currently abandoned afaik.

Actually really fun! Naturally creates cool moments with different characters and quirks

way better than it has any right to be. awesome game.

I've played it all the way through at least three times across eight years and whenever i come back to it the gameplay feels fresh. hiding around corners and teleporting around the guards is tense and then going full murder spree by blasting open windows and swinging swords feels fluid. and if things look too hard you can always just hit the ship with another ship. that you also stole.

Very fun game, easy to get sucked into for hours. I personally like the "pause to plan" mechanic it employs. Run into a room full of bad guys, pause and make your plan, then execute said plan resuming the action.

It may seem like a difficult game at first as it does take a few moments to get used to the play style but once you're familiar, it gets a lot easier. I'd recommend this game to anyone who enjoys strategy and tactical games as well as anyone who enjoys causing chaos in creative ways.

Bought this game years ago on sale and it was just sitting in my library un-played. Finally decided to give it a go. First hour was kinda rough as I didn't know what I was doing. Tutorial only covers very basic elements of the game. The rest you will just need to learn as you go. It does take some experimenting to get the most fun out of this game, and boy, is it fun. Don't worry about your character dying (especially in the beginning) as your characters are meant to be retired as the campaign goes on.

If the gameplay video looks even mildly interesting to you, I'd suggest buying it and giving it a proper go. You will be pleasantly surprised. The game feels polished and is a great example of an indie game done well. Although very different games, it does give me FTL vibes in that it was well thought out and balanced.

is another game where the devs think hard for the sake of hard = fun, when in fact thats not the case.

fun comes from rewarding a hard task. and gives proper tools to over come the task. making unkillable sheilded targets that requires a crash device only they all are sheilded and they all have heart beat sensors so that can see through walls so no hiding, and oh yea those crash devices? jammers. so you cant use em effectively making them unkillable just break the jammers? cant because it was placed on a check point with 5 guards effectively making it so you cant destory it. and oh yea you need to kill or knock out a guard in odder to progress to the next section of the ship? skip the mission? THERE ALL LIKE THAT. unless you plan to play easy missions only ( witch offers no reward, 10 points when everything costs 20 isnt a reward, thats like saying i will pay you 1 cent an hour to go and save the planet over and over again, the highest risk job paying next to nothing, you arnt rewarding the player. )

trust me you'll have more fun with endless dungon, it has a far better blance, then this game looks cleaner sounds better plays better.

its better peroid. case closed

Simply amazing.

How do more people not own this game?

Hotline Miami-esque sci fi immersive sim roguelite, is good

"Heat Signature" is the perfect example of a game wich puts gameplay over graphics. Every character has its own story and personal goal. If he/she fails or dies, you take control over another character whose story sometimes can be connected with previous hero. It's like watching a movie. After completing missions you will get liberation points to unlock new sectors, which give you access to new equipment. New equipment wil let you finish harder missions. That's how it goes.
There is big variety in missions and ways of doing them. Almost every new piece of equipment gives you ways of dealing with enemies. The game can be pretty addictive. Check it out. I'm sure it will give you more fun then some modern titles.

Fav of mine, if you're at all interested in immersive sim or stealth games and want to see a weird spin on that check it out.

Ran into a room. Hit one guy with a hammer and threw a wrench ar another guy. The first guy flew through a window. The resulting vacuum caused the wrench to hit me on the way out. I got the achievement "Nice Job". 10/10

It's good as far as what you get from it. The game progresses by getting more high end gadgets that let you take on enemies who will be invincible otherwise. You can generally classic stealth to a point but enemy contractors will make you play more seat of your pants. There's a few types of missions, and the enjoyment of the game is from going in to a hard mission and trying to win.

Balancing your inventory between weapons and gadgets is part of the game. You pick up a lot of stuff and you need to use it to win.

Understand that this is not a progression quest, the end game isn't that great and if you aren't enjoying it you should stop playing. The actual payoff is the defector missions where you get a bit of cool equipment and try to do a hard mission. i.e, the reward for playing the game is playing the game.

.

gud shii.

Probably my favorite game. It just feels *so good* to play

Maybe the most underrated game I own. The solo space pirate heists are so cool, and all the ridiculously clever gadgets let you pull them off in a million different ways.

All this time I was working for a Vigintillionare :(

Meh.

Starts out fun, about an hour in everything has shields and armor and you need to grind for specific equipment to deal with them because this makes them quite literally invulnerable. As in, they cannot be killed under any circumstance, but they can infinite kill you, chase you and set off the alarm.

There are solutions, but they are rare and one-off. You can deal with the occasional shielded/armored enemy by breaking windows or laying traps, not so much when it's 30 shielded enemies on a giant ship.

Oh, and they can teleport to you and instakill you. Sometimes this has no warning; the clearly labeled purple circle enemies do this and are fine, but sometimes they seemingly don't have any indicators.

A lot of games that are heavily based around systems and emergent gameplay fall somewhat flat for me because doing things in wacky ways feels somewhat pointless beyond "lol you can just drop a big rock on the enemies" or whatever.

Heat Signature is a case of a game in which the standard stuff that you get shown in the tutorial is and lots of fun by itself (it's hotline miami by way of FTL) but the act of exploiting the game's systems is also both intuitive and wildly effective. The game really clicks when you get on a big ship to assassinate someone, see the 40 people with shields between you and them, and decide instead to go hijack a different ship alltogether to shoot some holes into the former so you can dock right next to your target. Despite the relatively simplistic designs of the procedurally generated ships, there's tons of variety from mission to mission, and I keep discovering new things despite the fact that the game doesn't actually unlock much and progression is just new mission types or getting to buy certain item types instead of having to find them.

Anyway, it's lots of fun, you should play it.

very fun game, can recommend

Fun game. Requires both strategic thinking and quick, accurate execution. Eventually becomes somewhat repetitive, but still kinda fun.
Don't be afraid to experiment.

Buy at any price, it's dirt cheap and this game rules. Even when you suck at it, it's a ton of fun. The glee of successfully throwing swords into people's faces when your gun is on cooldown or drawing an entire ship's garrison to suck them into space never gets old, largely due to the fact you can pause the game at anytime, be that before you swap bodies to force someone to eat their own bullets or you just want to appreciate the moment before your carefully crafted stealth run turns into a chaotic mess of gunfire and bullettime.

A few years after I played this they retooled the difficulties to be much harder. I used to be a bloodless operator with an inventory full of wrenches, but now it's so much more necessary to delay alarms, use single-use items, or disable the ship's pilot to stop the capture countdown. Murder isn't always avoidable, and you need to learn to use the full compliment of your unlockable arsenal. It's more dynamic, as you usually can't get the exact same loadout across multiple characters without grinding some, so it forces you to change your playstyle and learn the new items/tools dynamically. Where when i first played it it was much more playing around and largely ignoring the ones that strayed from 'the path' of playing a stealth game, now it really plays up into its mashup of Hotline Miami and Superhot. A+.

im keeping the window business in business 10/10

Sooo many cool and creative mechanics. It's also a roguelike you're not expected to put 1000 hours into which is nice sometimes.

Puzzle solving where timing matters but you can stop time

Heat Signature is absolutely awesome. If you liked games like Hotline Miami, where you have an overhead view and go on insane solo raids, you’re going to love this. It’s basically that, but in space, with spaceships that are like random puzzles you have to figure out while blowing stuff up or sneaking around.

The coolest part is how many ways you can handle each mission. You can go in guns blazing, sneak past everyone, or use these wild gadgets like teleporters and traps. Every ship is different, so you have to think fast and come up with a plan, but it never feels repetitive.

Overall, this game is just so much fun. The missions are short enough to keep you hooked without feeling overwhelming, but there’s also a lot to unlock and explore. It’s one of those games where you’ll finish a mission and immediately want to jump into the next one. Go play it!

Heat signature is easily my favorite tactical stealth/action game.
You can pause any moment and take as long as you want to come up with an elaborate plan. More often than not, you'll misstep and that's when the real fun begins. Luckily, you have a diverse set of tools to help you get out of the situation you just put yourself in so precariously,
And the way the missions in the game are structured, you are gently nudged to try new approaches all the time. Or just when I think I finally found my favorite approach to any mission, I find myself in a pickle and try some disastrous idea out of desperation - and that idea becomes my favorite new trick.
10 / 10, nearly endless replayability, this game kept surprising me for about 50 hours and I'm still not sure I've seen it all.
Bonus points if you can get your friends to play daily missions and compare your approaches - it's some of the best fun you can have.

Super fun, the daily challenge adds a lot!

An all-timer. I keep coming back to this games year after year when I little top-down action or just don't know what to play. Great game to kill 30 minutes or a whole night.

Great game, would recommend. Reminiscent of Hotline Miami in gameplay, with the twist that you get to keep weapons and gear between missions. Fantastic in terms of replayability, though things can get repetitive unless you set challenges for yourself.

Bite sized, fast paced fun.

Get onto a ship
Get into trouble
Pause
Breathe
Rethink what you can do

Every single mission follows this pattern since you always have a plan and you always somehow mess it up.
But these are the moments that makes this game great, aside of those in which you discover some crazy mechanics, like using visitor on a passing ship to briefly teleport into it, steal the prototype and get pulled back before the guards even realize it.

Or use your gun to propel yourself through space to the enemy ship, which you soon take over.

The update with specialists shakes the meta quite a bit, perhaps putting too much weight on the guns and blades away from the gadgets, but even after so many missions this game does have its allure and invites you to try all over again with new set of items.

very underrated game. Captures the space itch, with a really fun hotline miami style roguelike gameplay. Long replayability and several different options for approach on each mission.