Heat Signature
Suspicious Developments · 2017 · Space, Stealth, Indie, Top-Down, Roguelike
PC
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Trailers & screenshots
About Heat Signature
✦ AI summary
Infiltrate spaceships across the galaxy, stealing loot and completing missions with pause-based tactical gameplay that lets you plan every move without time pressure. Emergent gadget interactions, procedurally generated scenarios, and character persistence create endless stories of daring heists and impossible escapes.
Break into spaceships!
Fly your pod up to any spaceship in the galaxy and dock with its airlock to sneak inside. From there, you've got to sneak up on the crew, outshoot them in slowmo gunfights, or outthink them with clever gadgets. Take missions to steal loot, assassinate VIPs, or rescue friends.
Take your time!
Get out of impossible situations by pausing at any time and taking as long as you need to figure out a clever plan. You have a wide range of gadgets with clever uses, and you can switch, aim and fire them with no time pressure at all, letting you pull off ridiculously cool tricks without needing twitch skills.
Liberate the galaxy!
All your missions get you closer to liberating new space stations from the empires that control them, and this unlocks new gadgets to buy in your shops, and special challenge characters to play.
Lots more features!
I'm not making GIFs for all these!
I'm not made of GIFs!
I'm not some kind of GIF-golem!
Emergent gameplay!
Use gadgets like teleporters, stealth shields and subverters to invent your own solutions to tricky situations.
Galactic zoom!
Zoom smoothly from a view of the whole galaxy down to your character sneaking up on guards inside the spaceship you're boarding.
Choose your difficulty!
You choose each mission, ranging from trivially easy to nightmarishly hard. There's also a practice mode where you can try items and tactics with no consequences and instant-restart.
Randomly generated missions!
Each one picks a random combination of guard kit, ship layout, and complications like space battles.
Each life is a new character!
Choose between randomly generated characters with different starting kit, and when you die, play as someone new in the same galaxy.
Personal missions!
Every character has one grand heist to work towards: rescue their brother, steal their gun back, get revenge on their partner's killer.
Modular destruction!
Blow up any part of a ship with breach grenades or fuel barrels. Rip a ship in half. Get sucked into space by the vacuum.
Rescue your friends' characters!
If someone on your friends list gets their character captured, and they aren't able to rescue them, maybe you can! You'll sometimes get a character whose personal goal is to rescue a friend's character. If you manage it, you unlock your friend's character to play as! They don't get it back. They had their chance. It's yours now.
Find your friends' items!
When you retire an accomplished character, you can choose one item to pass on. You get to name it, and both your Steam friends and your own future characters have a chance to find these as loot. Equally, you'll come across items your friends have named.
What Heat Signature is not:
We don't want you to buy Heat Signature if it's not for you. We'd always rather have a happy non-customer than an unhappy customer. So here's what it isn't:
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- It's not story-driven: there's a backstory to this place and a few conversations with characters, but there's not a story that develops as you play. It's much more about the stories you generate by playing, about how you got out of impossible situation X or pulled off crazy stunt Y.
- There aren't other careers: You can't mine asteroids. You can't build ships. You can't recruit a crew. You're an infiltrator, you break into spaceships for a living, it's all about that.
- There are no planets: The whole game takes place in this nebula full of space stations. You can dock at any friendly station and board any hostile ship, but it's not a space exploration game.
- It's not multiplayer: The friends features mentioned above are fun but they're just sharing content, it's not multiplayer at all and you're never in the same world together.
There are cool games about all those things. This is a cool game about something else!
DLC & expansions
🎁 Complete the collection
Base game + 1 of 1 DLC at today's best prices.
$16.19
to own everything
What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
So I am late to the party here, I bought this game back in 2020 or so, opened it, liked the vibes but couldn't get past the 2d top down art style. I thought "hu, neat it was 5 bucks so I will get to it eventually." Well friends, I have gotten to it. The addition of achievements might have been what I needed to have some goal for how to pursue the endgame of Heat Signature. There are a number of achievements that coax you into certain playstyles and I am having a blast chasing them. This game is somewhat dated in the textures and UI department but I don't find that it detracts from the experience at all. You can be a... Space ninja Space hitman Space thief Pacifist Ghost Communist? Space Hippie And so much more. I would recommend this game as a fast-paced puzzler more than anything, it scratches the hitman itch for me and I find that the missions very much push you into being extremely cautious where one mistake can blow your run. The overall gameplay loop is sort of a looter-shooter where your characters and gear are temporary so you should use them wisely. You gradually liberate the galaxy until you can purchase really powerful items quickly! I am almost through m…1 found this helpful
ooooh weee, it's half roguelite and half sandbox weirdly shoved into one thing which is confusing and incomplete feeling but whatever it's really fun you select a character from 4 randomly generated characters (ooh how fun) but then 3 of them have the same weapons and the other one is a pacifist (awww). and then you choose a randomly generated mission (ooooh freedom) but then they are either trivially easy or they have those shielded guys that take a ton of tools to defeat (awwwww). and then you you win and you can buy some okay weapons in the store (ooh fun?) or you lose and you don't do that i guess (noo). there is slight overall progression with unlocking new store items and the ability to choose which missions types/enemy types you don't encounter, but every unlock is just improved version of existing things. there is also like inter character story or something with the characters that you played with but i didn't really get it. but the main issue is what the heck am i supposed to do exactly, am i supposed to build up one character and conquer the galaxy with perfect play? am i supposed to mess around with all the crap the game lets you do like ram space ships into other s…1 found this helpful
Not a fan of the graphics, but the gameplay is so swag money it don't matter yo. Definitely pick this one up during a sale, gets super cheap.
provides the tools to be clever, without being overwhelming. very replayable, very tightly designed. Highly recommended and with no notes
super duper fun space piracy sandbox experience game !
great, very nostalgic
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