History VideoGame / HeatSignature

* AntiFrustrationFeatures: 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.

* ThereWasADoor: The Brick allows you to destroy a single room by ramming it, at which point you can (after completing the repair 'minigame') dock with the hole you just made.

* WhiteHairBlackHeart: Mirfak notes that white hair is a bit of a thing in Sovereign, lately. If you look closely, you'll see this is true; all Sovereign guards have white (or grey) hair. [[spoiler:Also, Sader - though she's old enough that it (probably) isn't dyed that way.]]

* AndNowForSomeoneCompletelyDifferent / ATasteOfPower: Defector missions allow you to play as mercenaries trying to get out of the organization they work for, and prove their loyalty to the Independent faction by going on a SuicideMission with some very powerful equipment. Guns are typically Armor-piercing, silent, quickfire, or any combination thereof, and equipment that use charges can recharge in a manner of seconds.
** Alternately, their missions can be very... unique. One special defector (whose name is always [[LetsPlay/NerdCubed Dan Hardcastle]], for the player who introduced the concept to the devs) challenge involves boarding a ''moving'' ship without a pod; you must propel yourself to the airlock using guns, which is surprisingly difficult.
* AntiFrustrationFeatures: 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

** As long as you don't set off the alarm on a ship, and it isn't a Time Limit mission, you can fly back to a friendly station and return to that ship as many times as you like. This is really useful if you dock with the ship and realize you need a tool which you don't have right now, but can be obtained from the shop or your stash. Also, because rechargeable items recharge every time you return to a station, this gives you a practically unlimited number of uses for them, provided you're careful not to trigger the alarm.

* AwesomeMcCoolname: In the future, people apparently name their kids after stars and other stellar phenomena. For instance, the ex-Sovereign cryptographer Mirfak Lagrange; Mirfak is from the Arabic name for Alpha Persei, and Lagrange refers to Lagrangian points. You can even add your own names to the pools if you want.

** 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 beyond provide a slower thruster mode that looks cool. You can't even sell it for money.

-->'''Sovereign''': Our accountants point out that since this region's currency is itself an armor-corrosive acid, existing penetration solutions are actually less effective than literally spraying the target with money

-->'''Player:''' ''"They're old, and also spies?"''

** Guards will ignore weapons/items that are just lying on the floor, because they clearly weren't dropped by Steve who hasn't returned from the bathroom yet even though he left ''twenty minutes ago''.

** Guards will behave the exact same way they do regardless of what weapons the player is wielding. For instance, they will happily teleport into the melee range of a concussion hammer/shortblade - the fastest-recharging melee weapons in the game. They'll also teleport into hazardous situations such as aforementioned subverted sentries,

* 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.

** ShootTheFuelTank: You can make a pretty speedy escape by blowing up a unit that has fuel in it, and then jumping into space.

* SuperReflexes: Represented by the Pause function, which allows you to pause the game and take an action, and the fact that time slows down when enemy units spot you. There's also a manual slow-motion function and the Slipstream device, which puts you into artificial bullet time; for ten subjective seconds and one real second, you move super fast and everyone else is slowed down. Just... don't accidentally defenestrate yourself.
* TapOnTheHead: As is often the case in movies and games, hitting someone on the head really hard with a blunt weapon will just knock them out indefinitely, instead of potentially giving them brain damage or fatal internal bleeding. Likewise, "concussive" guns instantly knock out their targets in a single shot...somehow. There are even [[ArtisticLicenseBiology armor-piercing concussive guns]], which makes no sense at all, but is pretty damn convenient for the TechnicalPacifist Off-Worlders. Concussive grenade launchers also exist, which knock out all unshielded targets in the blast radius.

* GameplayAndStorySegregation: Offworld Security's culture [[ThouShaltNotKill explicitly forbids killing under any circumstance]].. but they're just as willing to [[ThrownOutTheAirlock throw you out of an airlock]] as any other faction.

** ThrowingYourSwordAlwaysWorks: You can throw anything in Heat Signature, but it works best with weapons. This also offsets the Shortblade's normally extremely short reach; you can just ''throw'' it at guards instead of rushing them. Weapons can also be thrown even if they're on cooldown; this allows you to kill four guards using only two longblades.

* InfinityPlusOneSword: ''Fiasco's Facebreaker'', a unique weapon, toes the line. It's a nonlethal melee weapon, it ignores armor (which no other nonlethal weapon does), it's extremely quiet, it has the full 8-meter dash range of the Wrench/Longblade/Hammer, and it has the same swing rate as the Hammer. Armed with the Facebreaker, you can take down five unaware guards (possibly more) in the time it takes for one of them to ''sneeze''. It's kept from being the absolute problem-solver as it's still of little use against shields and the extreme knockback can be a liability if not accounted for. Still, the FlavorText says it best;

*** In another case of CuttingTheKnot, escaping capture usually requires taking out the pilot. Alternatively, you can destroy all of the engines (via shooting out the fuel cans) - once you've done so, the ship will be drifting, unable to dock safely at its destination. This isn't too hard with most ships, although Glitcher ships have a very odd distributed design that makes this tactic much harder, and Off-Worlder ships are GenreSavvy enough to distribute their engines and helm evenly and with annoyingly far-spaced segments.

'''Heat Signature''' is a WideOpenSandbox Roguelike Space Infiltration game with [[StealthBasedGame stealth elements]] from the creators of ''{{VideoGame/Gunpoint}}''. 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.

The game was developed over the course of four years, and is available on {{UsefulNotes/Steam}} [[http://store.steampowered.com/app/268130/Heat_Signature/ here]].

* AdamSmithHatesYourGuts: All of the common items you can get from guards are worthless in terms of sale value--they literally sell for nothing. Buying them, however, costs money (though thankfully it's not a whole lot--a wrench will only cost you one unit of acid, for instance). Everything that isn't single-use (or equivalent) costs quite a bit of money, and you start with almost no money at all. Many of the more difficult (and therefore higher-paying) missions feature guards with armor or shields, and you need specific gadgets or weapons to deal with them at all--and those cost money. Worse, since many of the more difficult missions these feature ''lots'' of guards with special protection, you need more than one such gadget. Earning money by doing a series of easier missions is certainly doable, but takes time. Unfortunately, a given character's ability to contribute towards liberations diminishes after doing enough missions, so by the time you get a bunch of quality gear, you have to retire the character and start anew. To make matters worse, one of the shops sells items that you haven't unlocked yet (only one such item, and it's chosen at random), but it's explicitly overpriced (usually up to 3x normal).

* ArmorIsUseless: On the contrary, it's ''very'' useful. The bright yellow armor worn by guards is '''100%''' impenetrable to everything short of specfic {{Armor Piercing Attack}}s or explosives, and unlike a personal shield it can't be disabled with hacking tools. The only thing non-AP weapons can really do to armored guards is briefly stagger/disorient the target by knocking them off their feet for a split second, though close-range shotgun blasts and the concussion hammer can knock them back a long way, potentially launching them through a window.

* AwesomeYetImpractical: 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.

-->'''Sader Fiasco:''' ''"Nothing. They're all dead by thirty-six.''
------>''You make it to sixty in this job by being very, very, very, careful.''
------->''And eventually, you get a rep.''
-------->''If you wanna crush an empire in this galaxy, you send an armada.''
--------->''[[BadassBoast You wanna crush four, you send me]]."''

* ArmorIsUseless: On the contrary, it's ''very'' useful. The bright yellow armor worn by guards is '''100%''' impenetrable to everything short of specfic {{Armor Piercing Attack}}s or explosives, and unlike a personal shield it can't be disabled with hacking tools. The only non-AP weapons that can really do anything to armored guards are shotguns (at point blank) and concussion hammers, both of which can briefly stagger/disorient the target by knocking them off their feet for a few seconds, or potentially launching them through a window.

* AdamSmithHatesYourGuts: All of the common items you can get from guards are worthless in terms of sale value--they literally sell for nothing. Buying them, however, costs money. Everything that isn't single-use (or equivalent) costs quite a bit of money, and you start with almost no money at all. Many missions feature guards with armor or shields, and you need specific gadgets or weapons to deal with them at all--and those cost money. Worse, since many such missions feature ''lots'' of guards with special protection, you need more than one such gadget. Earning money by doing a series of easier missions is certainly doable, but takes time. But a given character's ability to contribute towards liberations diminishes after doing enough missions, so by the time you get a bunch of quality gear, you have to retire the character and start anew. To make matters worse, one of the shops sells items that you haven't unlocked yet (only one such item, and it's chosen at random), but it's explicitly overpriced (usually up to 3x normal).
* AndNowForSomeoneCompletelyDifferent / ATasteOfPower: Defector missions allow you to play as mercenaries trying to get out of the organization they work for, and prove their loyalty to the Independant faction by going on a SuicideMission with some very powerful equipment. Guns are typically Armor-piercing, silent, quickfire, or any combination thereof, and equipment that use charges can recharge in a manner of seconds.

* CoolSword: The Shortblade is held more like a tonfa, with the blade parallel to the forearm and tip near the wielder's elbow.

* DualWielding: You can only assign two items to active use at any time, but they can be any two. Your character sprite is only ever shown wielding one item at a time, though.

** SwordAndGun: A simple but effective combo - combine a longblade or shortblade with a suppressed sidearm. Or if you're feeling like a TechnicalPacifist, use a wrench/hammer and a concussion gun.

** Guards will wander off by themselves, either to check their email, investigate weird noises, or unfamiliar heat signatures.

** Guards will ignore your footsteps, allowing you to wander up behind them and rifle through their pockets with impunity.

** Guards will teleport into hazardous situations such as aforementioned subverted sentries, or into the melee range of a concussion hammer/shortblade - the fastest-recharging melee weapons in the game.

** Alternately, their missions can be very... unique. One special defector challenge involves boarding a ''moving'' ship without a pod; you must propel yourself to the airlock using guns, which is surprisingly difficult.
* AntiFrustrationFeatures: 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.

* 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.

** Also, armor-piercing weapons in Defector Missions may use regular ammunition instead of the special and rare AP ammunition.

* ArmorPiercingAttack: Necessary to bypass body armor, which is otherwise proof against basically everything - and, unlike shields, can't be crashed or subverted.

* MegaCorp: Sovereign. They're basically responsible for this entire mess; they sent a mining expedition to the Drift to evaluate the worth of it. When the expedition's long-range drives broke down on arrival, Sovereign hung them out to dry. The expedition survived, though, and lives on in the form of the Foundry faction. Unfortunately Sovereign is muscling back into the Drift because they know how valuable it is now.

* SequelHook: [[spoiler:Fiasco reveals she's been working for a fifth faction, who conquers the sector while the other factions are weakened from the war she started. She is ~70% confident that they won't kill everybody. If you select 'Mind if I watch it with you?', you get a view of the siege ship armada sweeping across the Drift, capturing station after station in rapid succession. This ends your 'current' run, but you can generate new Drifts and keep playing as much as you like.]]
* StealthHiBye: The Visitor type teleporter works like this, allowing you to pop into a nearby location only to be yanked back in about two seconds or so. This is often all the time you'll need to do whatever it is you want however, especially with the Pause mechanic.
* SuperReflexes: Represented by the Pause function, which allows you to pause the game and take an action, and the fact that time slows down when enemy units spot you.