Heat Signature got a pretty substantial update recently around the one year anniversary of its release. Is anyone still playing this game and what do you think of the new features? It seems like this game kind of got passed over by the bomb crew last year, which I guess was understandable given how packed the release calendar was in 2017 with lots of big releases. I knew Jeff liked it enough to put it on his GOTY list but otherwise nobody seems to talk about it much, which is a shame given how much play Gunpoint got with them when it was released.
There's a complete rundown of the changes on the game's Steam page if you want it, but here's a quick list of new things that I think are cool.
Contractors - missions can now have a number of more specialised enemy types with unique abilities. "The Jammer" wonders around a level throwing out jamming devices that disable your gadgets within a set radius; "Defenders" give all other guards within their vicinity shields that cannot be crashed, but the Defender themselves has a shield that can be crashed meaning you can take them out to remove the effect from the other guards; "The Tracker" always knows your location and hunts you relentlessly, and "The Predator" has a sensor that detects your presence if you stray within it's range, causing them to instantly glitch to your location and kill you immediately. The contractors add a nice new source of unpredictability for things to go south on you in the middle of a mission, and since Heat Signature has always been about improvising your way out of bad situations, this is a good thing. There are even some missions where if the alarm is triggered Contractors will start teleporting on to the ship at regular intervals until you disable the alarm.
Traits - characters can now have randomly chosen traits that can either be positive ones that benefit you or negative ones that limit you in certain way. I like that these push you towards changing up your play-style, but they also give the characters more flavour. Tom Francis mentioned that he realised that the system could give a character traits that conflicted such that the benefit of a positive trait could be nullified by a negative trait that the character also had. Rather than fixing it such that this was disallowed, he wanted to retain it purely because it would allow the player an opportunity to give the character a back-story that would explain how they came to have those conflicting properties. I was a bit sceptical about this when first hearing about it in the abstract, but once I encountered a character like this in the game it immediately made sense. After one mission I came across this guy who's traits said that he was ex-Sovereign (the faction that's deep into weaponry technology and who I imagine as a kind of martial culture that conceives of itself as a warrior-class in some way) and because of this he had some bonuses with swords. But one of his other traits said that he was also "Weak" and therefore unable to use any melee weapons at all, so it immediately became possible to imagine why he might now be "ex-Sovereign". Maybe he was permanently injured during a mission for Sovereign, and being no longer able to wield the swords that Sovereign fetishizes as connecting them to some ancient ideal of the warrior, he was thereafter disdained by his fellow Sovereigns which finally drove him in to leaving to go out into the galaxy on his own? Maybe. Either way, I kind of love that shit, though.
Clients - the job system has been expanded to include clients that each only offer jobs that all share the same clause. "The Protector" only offers jobs with the "Bloodless" clause that means that you can't kill anyone during the mission to get the full reward for completing it, for instance. There's also a client called "The Old Timer" and none of the missions on their job board include the newer additions like Contractors and so on, which makes it possible to play the game as if it were pre-patch. I think that it's really smart to allow players to more effectively choose what parts of the game they want to engage with and which they want to avoid. The old job board which mixes in all the types is still available too.
Glory - previously, once your character had completed their personal mission, there was kind of a limited number of things that made it worth continuing to play as that character. That could be a bit of bummer if, in the pursuit of their personal mission, that character was now equipped with a bunch of high-end gear. I guess the original intention would be that those characters would be who you would send out to attempt capturing a stronghold, but there wasn't much point to continuing to play any other type of missions with that character since all you would earn by doing so was money that you didn't actually need. They've fixed that problem by introducing a kind of "score mode" that allows you to earn Glory Points by completing specific missions. I haven't really done anything with that system so far, but Glory Missions seem like very high difficulty missions that require you to be very well equipped to even attempt. There's a score board, rankings and all that stuff attached to it if you want to compete with other players.
That's a lot of writing, but it really just scratches the surface of the changes. There's a swathe of smaller changes that aren't easy to categorise, too. One of my favourites of these is that you can now use Crash Beams on more things. Guards can be crashed to prevent them from raising the alarm. When a room is destroyed due to an explosion, the adjacent rooms have barriers placed on the doorways that would have lead to the now destroyed room. If you crash one of those barriers anyone in the room will be sucked out into space, which was always my favourite thing to do in this game. It never gets old, so new ways to send unsuspecting guards out into the void are great in my book.
So, what do you think? If you've not played in a while, maybe give the game another whirl. I'm liking it a lot: how about you?
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