Heat Signature

You'd not actually be too far off the mark with that description, but statements like that can also place unnecessary weight on the shoulders of a project before it has even seen release. However, when it comes to Heat Signature, that's not actually the case, and in reality the new game from the creator of Gunpoint is shaping up to be as good as it sounds.

Well, before we start firing out superlatives, we should mention that Heat Signature still has a ways to go before it's the finished article, and most notably there's plenty of room for the world to be fleshed out with more character and more options for interaction, but the basic mechanics are in place and everything works nicely in the build we've been playing.

It starts off, like so many games, in a spaceship. The movement of your craft is really floaty. You left click to move forward, right click to stop. It's sounds simpler than it is (at first, at least), but there's plenty of room for nuance as you master the momentum of your ship. However, flying around the galaxy is a means to an end, and hitting the space bar scans the local area, revealing potential missions for you to tackle. You must then chase down your selected target as quickly as possible, dock with their ship (without being seen - some ships have vision cones that must be avoided), and then the real action begins.

It's top-down, there's pulsating soundtrack, and you're swinging your wrench with reckless abandon. The Hotline Miami comparisons are valid, but only to a point. There's a significantly slower, more measured pace to the action here, and it's simply not as twitchy. It also felt more challenging to wriggle oneself out of a sticky situation here, though perhaps that will change with increased familiarity with both the systems and the controls (and, maybe, with better tools). The emphasis here is evidently more on stealth than action, and you don't have to kill everyone in sight. Patrolling guards lap different rooms, pilots sit oblivious to their surroundings in chairs, and different parts of the ship are often sectioned off and require key cards if you want to access them.

You can sneak in, knock out a few guards, snatch a target or whatever it is you've been sent in to do, and then get the hell out of Dodge. Or you can go in and kill everything with a pulse and hijack the ship if you'd prefer to tackle things that way. There's different missions revealed with each scan you make, so you've an element of choice. Some are as simple as infiltrating a ship and taking out a target before dropping them off at a friendly station and collecting a bounty, whereas others are more pressing in nature, and you'll need to hijack a target before it completes a designated journey (and the mission is gone).

Controlling your agent is simple enough. You move through environments with WASD, and aim with the mouse. You can pick up new weapons as you go, and with them you take on increasingly ambitious challenges. Getting caught, however, can be fatal, and if your enemies grab you, they'll chuck you out of the airlock and send you drifting off into space. You can grab your ship and go and rescue yourself if you're quick about it, but most often that's the end, and you need to pick a new agent and start again.

There's a simple and effective visual style that communicates everything you need to know about a level. It feels a bit spartan at times, and maybe the different ships could have a bit more personality, but that's clearly not the priority right now, as developer Tom Francis and his team are working on nailing the basics: the feel of the action, the quality of the procedural generation, the structure of the game and how it all fits together.

With Gunpoint we were given a short (and sweet) story-driven campaign, one that pitched the level of challenge just right. It was an authored game, and aside from the option to try out player-generated levels, there wasn't much incentive to go back. It looks like this is going to be changed with Heat Signature, and there could potentially be plenty of game for players to get their teeth stuck into thanks to the procedural generation of content, and the potentially huge game world.

We see where it could go given time and support, and with the build that we sampled already proving to be very playable, we have to conclude that Heat Signature has bags of potential.