History VideoGame / HeatSignature

* FrickinLaserBeams: Offworld Security's Concussion Guns have a limited capacity of 16 shots and are 'reloaded' by visiting friendly stations. They shoot light blue energy bolts that seem to disable targets through concussive/impact force (since they can still break windows) rather than being {{Static Stun Gun}}s

''Heat Signature'' is a WideOpenSandbox Roguelike Space Infiltration game with [[StealthBasedGame stealth elements]] developed by Suspicious Development of ''{{VideoGame/Gunpoint}}'' fame, led by Tom Francis. The game was developed over the course of four years, and was released on 21 September 2017. The game is available on {{UsefulNotes/Steam}} [[http://store.steampowered.com/app/268130/Heat_Signature/ here]].

* SparkOfTheRebellion: The tutorial shows Sader and Breaker liberating Coldrock Haven. The existence of an independant station causes [[PlayerCharacter mercenary types]] to flock to it, kick-starting the rebellion.

The story follows a galactic war between four factions, each acting independently. Each one rules the space stations that dot the nebula with an iron fist, and the hardworking folk that live in them want freedom. That's where you come in: maybe your wife was kidnapped by TheEmpire and you want to get her back, or maybe your brother was murdered by the CorruptCops of TheFederation. Either way, you're armed with a Breacher Pod, a short-range non-organic-matter teleporter, and a huge arsenal of futuristic weapons and gadgets to raise the money to fund your potential SuicideMission to save the ones you love or get revenge for their demise. Or maybe you just need to steal something to pay off an old debt.

** An easy but risky method is to hijack another ship, then fly it over to the target ship and open fire (the button you use to brake with your pod is used here to fire missiles). Unfortunately, there's no relative brake, handling an actual warship is about five times harder than flying with your pod, and the enemy ship will flee to a station while they return fire. Try to hijack a ship from the same faction as the one you're targeting, or they'll turn hostile when they detect you.

-->'''Player:''' ''"I don't get it."''
-->'''Mirfak:''' ''"Sovereign have a white hair thing going on these days, dunno if you noticed."''
-->'''Player:''' ''"But you have no hair."''
-->'''Mirfak:''' ''"That's the joke. Welcome to the joke. It's bad here now."''

* AntiFrustrationFeatures:

-->'''Player:''' ''"Hey Mirfak. You're Sovereign, right?"''
-->'''Mirfak:''' ''"Is it the hair?"''

--> '''Grenade Launcher:''' ''What if grenades but faster?''
--> '''Concussion Grenade Launcher:''' ''This device profoundly accelerates bedtime. -Offworld Security''

--> '''Asli Sixty:''' ''"Well, it's not my home. But it's about three and a half thousand light years... that way. Meph, where glitch was born. They were good at it there, better than us - they could glitch small things big distances, big things small distances..."''
--> '''Player:''' ''"Then?"''
--> '''Asli Sixty:''' ''"They tried teleporting a big thing a big distance. Teleported their entire fleet to the other side of the galaxy, leaving their planet defenseless and their fleet stranded. The fleet adapted: their short range glitch tech was beyond anything the rest of the galaxy had ever seen, so they could jump in and steal whatever they wanted from passing shipments. It was the weirdest war. Everyone's terrified of this hyper-advanced fleet, and the hyper-advanced fleet is just like, can we have some food please. Also does anyone want to join. This is boring."''

-->'''Player:''' ''"But it's OK to break their arms?"''
-->'''Geneva:''' ''"That's fine, yes."''

-->'''Player:''' ''"What if you have the wrong person?"''
-->'''Geneva:''' ''"That's what we keep asking cultures who kill. All force is wrong when you're wrong. Ours doesn't leave anyone dead."''

* HollywoodSilencer: Played with. Guns are normally quite loud, but can come in ''Quiet'' or ''Silent'' versions. ''Quiet'' reduces the sound radius significantly (though the weapon can still be heard in adjacent rooms), whilst ''Silent'' reduces the sound radius to one or two meters at most.

** Armor-piercing guns let you finally deal with armored opponents. However, they only use armor-piercing ammo, which can't be bought (aside from purchasing an expensive armor-piercing gun, which comes with a dozen such bullets) and are rare to find (and even then, only in small amounts). And since guards don't carry armor-piercing guns themselves, you can't restock your ammo from dropped guns like you can with normal guns. This makes the automatic versions of armor-piercing guns especially impractical, since their high rates of fire are largely irrelevant, given your very low ammo supply.

** Also added in the Challenge Update - Upon becoming alerted, guards will shout different phrases depending on what alerted them - if a gunshot or body did so, they will shout "Gunshot!" or "Body!", repsectively.

* ArchaicWeaponForAnAdvancedAge: The lethal melee weapons are the Longblade and Shortblade, essentially a longsword and shortsword respectively. They clearly have some social/cultural function within Sovereign society, as many of their ships have sparring areas (complete with faded bloodstains) and Sovereign guards that don't carry guns will carry Longblades instead. Also notable in that all characters appear to wield the Longblade similarly to the classical european 'Ox guard' style (though on their left, rather than right).

* DeflectorShields: Shielding units are available to both guards and the player. Guards may have emergency shields that only activate when they're alerted, or shields that are always active. You can use a manually-activated shield that lasts for a few seconds. In both cases, shields deflect all bullets and provide immunity to explosions.

** If you somehow manage to lock a keycard on the other side of the door it unlocks, you can just teleport it to you. You can also mark items as 'teleport to stash' if you don't have enough inventory space, and they'll be put into your stash when you undock, or are [[ExplosiveDecompression blown out a window or destroyed module]], or ThrownOutTheAirlock.

** The Offworld Angel pod makes it ''much'' easier to catch yourself and whoever else gets defenestrated into space ''and'' negates the [[MaximumHPReduction permanent bleed-out timer reduction]] that normally follows being wounded and then ThrownOutTheAirlock down to one-third of its original penalty. Barring the default replacement pod, it is also the cheapest boarding craft in the game and can usually be unlocked pretty early on.

** The Sovereign Coldfire is a Breacher pod that uses StealthInSpace to be immune to visual sensors, and it has an alternate thruster mode that makes it immune to "heat sensors" - which are extremely rare. It looks cool, but avoiding visual sensors is quite easy anyway, and you can't shoot out windows from the outside either. Its alternate thruster mode doesn't seem to do anything else except provide a slower thruster mode that looks cool. You can't even sell it for money.

* BraggingRightsReward: Glory, accomplished by completing missions that award Glory - which are extremely difficult end-game level missions.

** On a slightly less direct note, guards carrying heat sensors can be more easily decoyed than those without them, particularly on thin-walled ships. It's possible to lure a key-carrying guard through a locked door by walking into his heat sensor radius on the opposite side of a wall, then knock him out and steal his key, all with minimal risk of being discovered.

* OneHitKill / OneHitPointWonder: Anyone that isn't you has exactly 1 HP. Each time you take lethal damage, you suffer from bloodloss and you'll lose about four to six seconds off your base thirty-second timer. This can only be prevented if you receive medical attention from the Offworld Angel pod's autodoc system.
** On the other hand, armor and shields seem to be effectively invulnerable to most forms of attack, making them a serious challenge. They can only be bypassed with an ArmorPiercingAttack or HollywoodHacking respectively.

** Predators: Project a purple field that expands and contracts periodically. If you enter the field, they will immediately teleport to you and stab you. Shields won't protect you from their attacks, either.

** The Offworld Angel pod makes it ''much'' easier to catch yourself and whoever else gets defenestrated into space ''and'' completely negates the [[MaximumHPReduction permanent bleed-out timer reduction]] that normally follows being wounded and then ThrownOutTheAirlock. Barring the default replacement pod, it is also the cheapest boarding craft in the game and can usually be unlocked pretty early on.

* AwesomeButImpractical: The Everything Gun, which works kind of like HalfLife2's Gravity Gun. Upon firing, it will instantly teleport any loose objects within a large radius to your gun and fire them out a high speeds in a spread pattern, knocking out everything in its path. Since the projectiles ricochet all over the place, this can also knock ''you'' out, too. On top of that, if there aren't any loose objects lying around within range, the gun is literally useless.

* DysfunctionJunction: The Foundry is a society of hardcore engineers, and they view all problems through the lense of a engineer. This includes things like mental health or sociological problems. If there's a problem, they work on a technical solution.

** There's also ''Tesh's Instant Connection'', a unique concussion hammer that has an instant recovery and a slipstream effect upon landing a hit, and ''Cherry's Fatal Attraction'', a unique longblade that can be used once to both teleport to a target and stab them... through both shields and armor. While the hammer is even faster than the normal concussion hammer, its slipstream effect is hard to control and it can't do anything to shields or armor. Meanwhile, the longblade's teleport ability can only be used once before it simply behaves like a normal armor-piercing longblade. Nonetheless, those two weapons are still much more effective tools than normal.

* ItsPersonal: ''Everyone'' has a goal that they want to achieve and this takes the form of their Personal Mission. Completing them allows the player to turn one of the items on the character's person to be named and turned into an artifact when they retire to be found by future characters and Steam friends. It also immediately unlocks an outpost liberation.

* LaResistance: You're in it. Explicitly stated to be the best approach to dealing with Sovereign, the local MegaCorp: Sovereign can beat ''anyone'' in a standup fleet fight, no questions asked... but they're just not equipped or trained to fight against guerrilla tactics.

* WhatAPieceOfJunk: The Glitcher's Tick, a breacher pod just as rough and junky looking as any other Glitcher craft, complete with parts that constantly rattle mid-flight, yet preforms just as well as any other pod and comes with a teleporter-based automatic docking system to boot.

* InvincibleHero: Invoked - Your character can get a reputation for this...and it's not a good thing. As you complete more and more missions with one character, stories of your exploits become more and more commonplace, and thus, less inspiring to the resistance, to the point where people just ''expect'' you to win all the time and don't pay attention. You need to move on to new heroes in order to keep the wheels of the resistance rolling.

* CastFromMoney: The primary currency of the galaxy is the corrosive acid that makes up the nubulea around you. [[GameplayAndStoryIntegration What if you had a gun that could shoot corrosive acid?]]

* FacelessGoons: All Offworld Security personnel aside from Gemini wear fully-obscuring headgear; guards appear to have an opaque-visored helmet, whilst officers seem to have a kind of... ballcap-goggles-headset-balaclava combo.

** There's also ''Tesh's Instant Connection'', a unique concussion hammer that has an instant recovery and a slipstream effect upon landing a hit, and ''Cherry's Fatal Attraction'', a unique longblade that can be used once to both teleport to a target and stab them... through shields. While the hammer is even faster than the normal concussion hammer, its slipstream effect is hard to control and it can't do anything to shields or armor. Meanwhile, the longblade's teleport ability can only be used once before it simply behaves like an armor-piercing longblade. Nonetheless, those two weapons are still much more effective tools than normal.

** The tutorial begins with Sader Fiasco getting punched through a window.

--> '''Asli Sixty:''' ''"They tried teleporting a big thing a big distance.''
--> ''Teleported their entire fleet to the other side of the galaxy, leaving their planet defenceless and their fleet stranded.''
--> ''The fleet adapted: their short range glitch tech was beyond anything the rest of the galaxy had ever seen, so they could jump in and steal whatever they wanted from passing shipments.''
--> ''It was the weirdest war. Everyone's terrified of this hyper-advanced fleet, and the hyper-advanced fleet is just like, can we have some food please. Also does anyone want to join. This is boring."''

-->'''Geneva:''' ''"You know what?''
-->''There's a politic answer to this my CO would give to outsiders, about how seriously we take it, but no. It does. We are. I am.''
-->''I will beat twenty people unconscious if it stops one death.''
-->''I will break all of your fingers if I think one of them's going to pull a trigger.''
-->''I'll do worse, for less.''
-->''Pain ends. Death doesn't. That's the end of it for me, for us. I'm not here to make my culture palatable to you, so if you don't like it finish your drink and leave me the hell alone."''

-----> ''Teleported their entire fleet to the other side of the galaxy, leaving their planet defenceless and their fleet stranded.''
------> ''The fleet adapted: their short range glitch tech was beyond anything the rest of the galaxy had ever seen, so they could jump in and steal whatever they wanted from passing shipments.''
-------> ''It was the weirdest war. Everyone's terrified of this hyper-advanced fleet, and the hyper-advanced fleet is just like, can we have some food please. Also does anyone want to join. This is boring."''

----->''There's a politic answer to this my CO would give to outsiders, about how seriously we take it, but no. It does. We are. I am.''
------>''I will beat twenty people unconscious if it stops one death.''
------->''I will break all of your fingers if I think one of them's going to pull a trigger.''
-------->''I'll do worse, for less.''
--------->''Pain ends. Death doesn't. That's the end of it for me, for us. I'm not here to make my culture palatable to you, so if you don't like it finish your drink and leave me the hell alone."''