YMMV / Heat Signature

• Demonic Spiders: Armored enemies are extremely difficult to deal with unless you have explosives or armor-piercing weapons, both of which are in limited supply and they're always very expensive, hard to acquire, or highly limited in other ways (AP concussion weapons have a maximum of 16 shots, AP shortblades have very short range, acid traps require preparation and possibly luring guards in, etc.). If an enemy has armor and shields, get ready to burn subverters and crashbeams taking down just one group of guards.
  • Then again, a number of methods can be employed to deal with them, including knocking them out of a window, or bypassing them entirely through use of teleporters and/or stealth shields.
  • General consensus is that the Defender, one of the four Contractors added in the Space Birthday update, becomes this in the later stages of the game. Defenders give every single guard in a large radius an uncrashable shield, requiring the player to take out the Defender first... who also carries a standard shield of their own. This makes it so that the player will typically need to use at least two charges of crash/subversion gadgets or grenades on ships with shielded guards and can easily put the player in a bad spot.
• Fridge Brilliance: The Glitchers Faction believe that the important part of people is their "pattern", not their body, so if they die, but an exact clone of them exists, then it doesn't matter. The Faction itself is an extension of that philosophy. They let anyone come and go from their ranks, so while it's quite possible that all the original glitchers or their family members are gone, the faction still exists, and that's all that matters.
• Fridge Horror: If you look at the release trailer again, you'll note the Contractor in the video is taking a mission to assassinate Santana Fiasco. The Contractor has no idea what a bloody mess they're about to cause.
• Game-Breaker: Self-Charging items, to a degree. Whilst exceptionally rare, these items steadily recover charge up to their maximum; a self-charging crashbeam or subverter can significantly decrease the difficulty of missions full of shielded guards and sentry guns. They're generally only acquirable via sheer luck, though; you can never unlock them on the strategy map, and even if you could the base cost modifier is insane. On the rare occasion that a self-charging device appears as the random item at the General Store, they can cost in the region of 1,000 acid thanks to the Overpriced triple-cost multiplier, meaning that such items would cost in the region of 300-400 acid under normal circumstances. For context, the hardest 'normal' missions top out around 100 acid payouts. The only way you make that kind of money in any reasonable kind of timeframe is completing a Theft-type Personal Mission.
  • There are a few instances where self-charging weapons are starter equipment, but oftentimes self-charging is the only modifier attached, meaning the weapon is mainly good for direct combat. In a Stealth-Based Game.
  • The fact that Liberators have these items makes them Game Breakers too, especially since their Self-Charging items can appear with multiple traits, which may result in a liberator that has a Self-Charging Silent Armor-Piercing Gun.
  • The old Key Cloner and Stealth Shield combo can get you through almost every mission type in the game. All you need to do is sprint through a ship, cloning every key you can get, and rapidly burning stealth shields to bypass guards. You can bring pretty much anything else to augment this, but Visitors and Sidewinders help dramatically with retreating to safe spots and getting far enough to clone particularly far keys. The only thing this solution does not work on are Jammers, whose anti-gadget shields prevent the Stealth Shield from going off.
• That One Achievement: "One Careful Owner", requiring you to complete a Hijack mission with the Warzone modifier. Warzone is already rare as is, so you'll spend some time hunting the chance to try it down, but once you get it, you have to actually contend with the awful combination: Hijack missions are automatically failed if the ship is too damaged (losing a few segments), and Warzone means moments after you begin, another faction's ship will immediately tail your target and start blasting it nonstop with Breach torpedoes, pretty much ruining it in short order and immediately triggering the alarm even if you didn't do anything. Completing it is a Luck-Based Mission to get a combination that even lets you be fast enough to grab it and leave.
• That One Level: Any mission labelled "Audacious" or "Mistake" has the potential to turn sour fast, and this is often due to multiple factors stacking on one another (for example: a very large ship with twice as many guards, all of whom can glitch dash/have shields/are armored/are armed with shotguns, whilst also being full of sentry turrets, and is already on the way to an enemy station/has a very short alert timer is practically normal for this difficulty).
  • Personal Missions are often almost impossible unless you have a ton of high-tier weapons and gadgets. The only way a personal mission can be easy is if it's an assassination mission, in which case you can simply bomb the hell out of the ship your target is on and hope to god you hit them. Since they can be tried multiple times, this is practically necessary before you get any of the better equipment/have liberated enough systems to unlock said equipment in stores.
  • Stronghold Liberations are the hardest types of missions in the game, and will be absolutely merciless if you attempt them. This is especially the case because you have to send them on a suicide bombing into a stronghold to blow it up, meaning if you're not quick enough to leave the ship you can actually die. The evacuation timer is a little more generous than it appears, but you're often better off leaving via a window than trying to sprint all the way back to your pod.
  • The Glory missions are all pretty tough and are specially designed for veteran players. Most of them are manageable if you have adequate equipment — except some go an extra mile and put a lock on your inventory, allowing you to use only 2 items throughout the entire mission.