Heat Signature Catch-all

With little or no warning that I saw, Heat Signature released today!

This is the latest game from Tom Francis, who previously developed Gunpoint, so this is an automatic day-one purchase for me.

This game is very good.

This is spectacular and fun.

Teleport-Swapping with a guard so that he shoots himself is great, but my favourite is finding a ship with a long corridor that has a window at the end... Batter up!

Unless something's changed since it was announced, there's a special gun that's only available during launch week.

I watched the GB Quick Look and this looks incredible.

Plate is full right now, but this one is getting shortlisted for when my schedule opens up.

Can't wait!

Aaaaand, bought.

Which burns through the last bit of credit I had sitting in my Steam account, and am on a moritorium for more game purchases for the rest of the year.

But between this, Project Cars 2 and Cuphead, I'll be juuuust fine.

I picked it up this morning and I'm really enjoying it. The thing i disliked about hotline Miami's game play was how rushed everything felt. With pause, all that rush is removed and i can just enioy. Plus, IN SPACE!

I had $10 in Steam money from selling trading cards and boy did I spend it on this game. What a steal for me!

shoptroll wrote:

Unless something's changed since it was announced, there's a special gun that's only available during launch week.

I finally snagged it last night. It's certainly a thing. Not a good thing, or a bad thing, but mostly a hilarious thing.

Finally, a gun that shoots guns.

This looks spectacular. And the trailer narrated by the Something True narrator helps.

Sold, played an hour at lunch, looking forward to devoting my weekend to it

Probably going to get it too.... have to use my humble discount on something.... was watching Giant Bomb play it, and had a serious laugh out loud moment, where they thought they glitched the game and lost the assassination target, when they actually brought it back to their home pod, so they put the knocked out body in to the drop point and it returned with the message, "Objective seems to be alive, but we can fix that."

This game provides some great moments.
Barely alive after an audacious warzone mission, the only dock was blown up long ago.
After finally snagging the tech I was supposed to steal, turned to a large window, said "Docks? I make my own docks"

Then I proceeded to almost flub up the remote control of my pod to pick me up from the vacuum of space.

I'm still new to the game, but man is it hilarious.

I really hope that getting ejected through a window is how Tom Francis starts all of his games.

Never played Hotline Miami so this is taking a little bit of getting used to, but I like what I've seen so far.

EDIT: Had a hell of a time last night recalling what the combat flow reminded me of so much, and then realized I was thinking of Final Fantasy XV's combat when you have Wait Mode enabled. With Transistor a close second.

Rescuing yourself becomes rather easier if you capture an enemy ship along the way and use their weapons to create new access points in your target.

I put about 15 holes in the ship that had captured one of my characters and then you can just walk in, pick yourself up and go home. I subverted a distant turret just so the ship guards wouldn't feel bad that I hadn't killed any of them.

Any of the ones who didn't get sucked out into space through all the new ventilation that is.

What?! I never even thought of trying that. I would guess that means you can also 'protect' a ship in a warzone by fighting off its attacker prior to completing your mission yourself.

The big ships you can capture brake like a planet and turn like an iceberg, so you'll want to start your braking burn more than a minute before you catch your target to try to align trajectories and velocity. Target ships will fire back, so don't be shy in spamming the fire button.

With a few well-placed shots you can sever your target from its engines and then you've all the time in the world.

I picked this up over the weekend on the strong recommendation of many people. I had fun for the first 45 minutes or so, but it faded quickly as I started to just keep seeing the same things over and over again. Based on some of the prototype gameplay TF showed a few years ago I was expecting to have a more amount of gameplay centered around how my ship flew and how stealthy it was, but that was nowhere to be found. Infiltrating the first few ships was fun, but once I started looking to do something more interesting the problems started. Each time my crafty plan might as well have been impossible either from lack of random loot that could accomplish it, or from a lack of the game actually being capable of communicating how I might actually be able to accomplish it with my current tools.

There's a ton of stuff in tooltips that has no explanation whatsoever. (what on earth is an Electronic Guard Kit?) I hear people talk about getting sucked out into space but the tutorial never even mentioned breaches so I have to assume that's just something I get the tools for later. I captured enemy ships and flew them around for a while but the game never even hinted at the fact I could fire some sort of weapons they had on board. The majority of any hard mission I was offered had guards with armor, while the game didn't even tell me how I could deal with it. (I still wouldn't know after playing 3 hours if boogle hadn't told me, and I still haven't seen any of the stuff he mentioned in game.)

I assume that the ultimate goal is just to fill out the skill tree, but the game also doesn't really bother telling you why you want anything it's offering (what makes a "super" shotgun any different from the regular ones?) or why I should care about any of the special missions that are offered through those nodes. This just left me to kind of aimlessly chase the extra money nodes in hopes of getting to a more interesting mission out of my personal quest than the same randomly generated normal ships.... well it was slightly more interesting, but again I didn't have any of the tools I felt like I should have had and I quickly died. "OK, I'll just go get better gear and try aga.... oh I start completely from scratch..."

Worse still, once I felt like I finally had enough tools at my disposal to finally take out a personal quest and start doing something interesting I lost the ability to keep making skill tree progress, seemingly forcing me to throw it all away and grind through a bunch of rote simple missions in hopes of the random drops getting me back in fighting shape in time for this character to become "too famous"...

Why doesn't this stupid game want me to do any cool stuff? How did I get tricked into buying an RNG driven loot-based rogue-lite when it was supposed to be about stealthy space ships?

is both

I am not sure what you mean by the skill tree in this game, Cathadan. The only character progression in this game is the inventory of items you build up (and the progressive damage you take as you get shot/spaced). The real progression of the game comes from the metagame of liberating stations, unlocking new items in stores, increasing your starting cash, getting access to new pods, etc.

I would recommend not getting too attached to one character early on and experiment with different people with different starting kits to see how things work. A guy who starts with a crashbeam and a long blade will approach situations differently from someone who starts with a swapper and a breach grenade launcher.

I think this game really shines when you get in a little over your head or take contracts with conduct restrictions that force you to play a certain way. It also really rewards creative problem solving. Maybe your assassination target has armor and you have no armor piercing weapons, blow up the fuel tank in his room or shoot out the window to space him. Or maybe you're in a situation where you can't get past a door, use a breach grenade to make a hole in the ship and dock your pod on the other side of the breach. One time I had a mission where I was stuck out in space with no pod and just a shotgun, and I had to use the recoil from shooting the gun to propel myself back onto the enemy ship. Heck, one time I had a brand new character who took a hard assassination mission I had no chance of completing legitimately. Instead of trying to infiltrate the ship, I captured a smaller ship and rammed it into the ship my target was on, spacing him.

I'm having a blast with this game.

Geez, I am having no luck getting the everything gun yet... I guess I'm going to have to try to get some better equipment before I actually try to take that ship on. I've been knocked out, spotted without enough time to get to the vault, an auto turret I couldn't get pass with the character I had, and then getting jump scared when the ship went under attack right when walking to the next room, which suddenly disappeared and i was in space X_X

EriktheRed wrote:

I am not sure what you mean by the skill tree in this game, Cathadan. The only character progression in this game is the inventory of items you build up (and the progressive damage you take as you get shot/spaced). The real progression of the game comes from the metagame of liberating stations, unlocking new items in stores, increasing your starting cash, getting access to new pods, etc.

The skill tree is just the interconnected stars, right? That's the only form of permanent progression I could find. All the increases to starting cash seem so small as to be completely inconsequential. Everything else on the tree is so inadequately explained that I didn't even know that other different pods were a thing, and still don't know what they would look like or do for me.

EriktheRed wrote:

I think this game really shines when you get in a little over your head or take contracts with conduct restrictions that force you to play a certain way. It also really rewards creative problem solving. Maybe your assassination target has armor and you have no armor piercing weapons, blow up the fuel tank in his room or shoot out the window to space him. Or maybe you're in a situation where you can't get past a door, use a breach grenade to make a hole in the ship and dock your pod on the other side of the breach.

I agree that it's at its best when you're in a challenging mission, but I really resent the fact that it doesn't actually bother to teach you about 90% of the stuff that you need to know to solve the sort of problems that seem to be the core of the game. It never teaches you about breaches (how to create them, how they work in the moment, what effects floating through space has on you, what do windows even look like?), anything about space flight beyond docking (can ships suffer damage at all? are they equipped with weapons? can you fire them? can you dock two larger ships together?), or anything about weapons besides a wrench and basic gun (silent weapons aren't really silent, the entire grenade family seems useless, the fact that armor piercing is even a thing, etc...)

The tutorial basically teaches you to kill everyone you see and leaves you to expect that's the entire scope of the game.

Silent weapons are silent (on pause they have an awareness radius), you may be thinking of quiet weapons which have a larger, but not huge alert radius.
The tutorial definitely does not teach the game, I found myself learning complex interactions (like using a gun in space to propel yourself) from liberation missions mostly.

The liberation missions have been fantastic for learning how different gadgets, mechanics, and weapons all work in the world. I had a liberation where I was to rescue someone on a large ship using nothing but a self-recharging glitch trap and a self-recharging swapper. Ended up using the glitch trap to move the rescue target into other rooms and then swap myself with the guards. Not a single guard killed.

Vector wrote:

The liberation missions have been fantastic for learning how different gadgets, mechanics, and weapons all work in the world. I had a liberation where I was to rescue someone on a large ship using nothing but a self-recharging glitch trap and a self-recharging swapper. Ended up using the glitch trap to move the rescue target into other rooms and then swap myself with the guards. Not a single guard killed.

Spoiler:

You can also glitch trap from your feet to space and then swap with guard for a silent kill

boogle wrote:
Vector wrote:

The liberation missions have been fantastic for learning how different gadgets, mechanics, and weapons all work in the world. I had a liberation where I was to rescue someone on a large ship using nothing but a self-recharging glitch trap and a self-recharging swapper. Ended up using the glitch trap to move the rescue target into other rooms and then swap myself with the guards. Not a single guard killed.

Spoiler:

You can also glitch trap from your feet to space and then swap with guard for a silent kill

Spoiler:

I did that on my first attempt but accidentally spaced the target so I decided on my next try to avoid killing.

boogle wrote:

The tutorial definitely does not teach the game, I found myself learning complex interactions (like using a gun in space to propel yourself) from liberation missions mostly.

Aha, then the game also failed in a big way by not giving any hints for why you might want to play the liberation missions. They just seemed like a waste of time given that they don't actually earn you anything tangible.

Cathadan wrote:
boogle wrote:

The tutorial definitely does not teach the game, I found myself learning complex interactions (like using a gun in space to propel yourself) from liberation missions mostly.

Aha, then the game also failed in a big way by not giving any hints for why you might want to play the liberation missions. They just seemed like a waste of time given that they don't actually earn you anything tangible.

It's kind of similar to Hitman (2016) escalations. The developer doesn't make you play them, but thru playing them you learn what should be solvable problems (and conversely what is not a solvable problem) given a certain set of tools.

Two things I just learned.

1) You can throw weapons using "T"
2) Thrown weapons can bounce off walls and knock you unconscious

There's even an achievement for knocking yourself out.

Real life doesn't have that achievement.