PC Critic Reviews

By making excellent use of its procedurally generated world and wacky gadgets, Heat Signature is a mission worth taking.

Heat Signature’s strength lies in its ability to make you think fast when you have all the time in the world.

With a set of thieving and assassination tools that beg to be used creatively, Heat Signature’s puzzle-like missions are great for jumping into for a few goes at a time to try something just crazy enough to work. That’s when the fun stuff happens.

This is one of the best "space bounty hunter simulators" we've played in a while. A very interesting title we recommend particularly if you like 2D.

Heat Signature is one of the tightest indie action games I've played, packing a maximum amount of excitement into a minimum amount of time and space. My first few hours with the game were genuinely wonderful, filled with rapid-fire moments of delight and triumph. But when I hit my personal skill ceiling, I could do no more than repeatedly bang my head against it. I respect Heat Signature. I admire its success in accomplishing with such skill what it set out to do, and if it had been more forgiving, it wouldn’t be as tense. Heat Signature’s laser focus on in-depth mechanical play with high consequence is at once what made it satisfying for me to play and what made it easy to put down and walk away from when I hit the limits of my tactical creativity.

Unfortunately, Heat Signature’s structure lets it down somewhat. It becomes a repetitive grind, broken up by the occasional amazing moment. The procedural generation makes it feel special, randomly creating an environment for these unique anecdotes, but it is a double-edged sword as there are a multitude of uneventful missions in-between. Still, it all feels worth it for those moments when there are a few seconds left on the clock and you are forced to take desperate action.

What you're left with is a game that many players will get around 10-15 hours out of before being shut out behind a vicious skill wall. Until that point, every player will run into some amazing moments that beg to be shared with friends. Heat Signature is a machine for watercooler talk. And if you're up to the challenge, there's a mountain waiting to be surpassed here. I just wish there were a few tweaks that would allow Heat Signature's fun to continue on for everyone, not just the highest skilled folks among us.

Heat Signature is, in theory, another empire-building game like Far Cry or Assassin's Creed, in which you prise away nodes of geographical control, amassing plunder if not XP or character levels. It never feels like that, though. It cultivates an air of supreme disposability instead, its ships thrown together only to be picked apart as you'd pull the legs off a spider, its adventurers little more than loadouts with funky labels and an optional bespoke final mission. Inevitably, this framework rings a bit hollow after a few hours of continuous play (you could spend upwards of 20, I think, reeling in every last space station and beating every last Defector quest) - these systems remain charming to the finish, but there's a sense that Heat Signature is reliant on players being heartily sick of games that invest such acts of open-ended vandalism with broader significance. Forgive it that, however, and this is a piratical delight.

Suspicious Developments have distilled that chaotic kinaesthesia into something much smaller, smarter and spacier, which is absolutely to be praised. Even if I found myself feeling like an aggravated villain as often as I felt like the fleet-footed hero. Even if I’m still sour about the man who killed my mum.