Heat Signature

Heat Signature

Heat Signature is a little bit stealth, little bit roguelike, little bit realtime, little bit sandbox, and little bit pause-and-think.

Overview

Heat Signature is a top-down game where you go on missions to infiltrate starships. The game is loosely real-time, but you can pause at any time to give a command, so it's a more thinky and less twitchy. The game is fairly unique so I'll go over some of the features. 

Features

Stealth

If I had to pick a single genre, I would call Heat Signature a stealth game. For the most part you can't just go in shooting and dodging. You have to look at guard walking patterns, and often sneak up on them. Frequently you will try to avoid guards rather than kill them. While stealth is not my favorite genre, this game has the perfect amount. You quickly learn that all guards will do some sort of patrol, and it's pretty easy to guess their route. There is a fast-forward button so you can quickly advance the game to when that one guard moves where you want him to. 

Roguelike

I hesitate to call this game roguelike, since the term is overused. However, you gain items and money and can experience permadeath. 

Sandbox

There is a strange combination of sandbox and campaign. When you start, there are a lot of stations to unlock and it seems like the goal is to win by liberating enough stations. However, there is no urgency to it and not much story to drive that goal.

When you start a new agent, they have a personal goal. To me, this feels more urgent than the campaign goal. To complete the personal goal, you have to save a bunch of money to unlock a really difficult mission. 

Beyond the goals of liberating stations and doing personal missions, there are achievements, defector missions, and codes of conduct. There is also potential to do unstructured challenges, or you might choose to only take missions from a certain client.

One way that it really tries to be like a sandbox game is to have some surprising interactions that you mostly discover accidentally. Like, you sounded the alarm and you only have 10 seconds to get back to your ship, but it's too far away. You think and think and realize there is a window near by. You shoot the window and get sucked into space. Fortunately, you have about 30 seconds to remote pilot your ship to pick you up. While not as rich as a true roguelike (like Nethack), there is a lot of fun things to learn to keep up the interest. On your first mission, you might have trouble killing one or two guards with a single gun. After a while, you can take on a group of five with just two wrenches.

My Take

I pretty quickly stopped caring about personal missions and unlocking stations. Without a larger goal, the individual missions became less interesting. The most fun for me was to do the defector missions. These are like puzzles where you do a mission with a fixed set of gear and don't impact the campaign in any way.

Should You Buy It?

I enjoyed it well enough but I played less than 20 hours, which isn't much for me. I found the game similar to FTL but I enjoyed FTL more. So, if you loved FTL and want something like it, give Heat Signature a try. If you haven't played FTL, take a look to see which one you think will appeal more.

Magic the Gathering: Arena (BETA)

The first time I saw Magic: The Gathering was at a convention. Nobody had heard of it back then. The guy demoing it tried to get me excited about the collectible nature of the game and I totally didn't get it. What is the fun of a game if one person has an advantage? Anyway, I was wrong and MtG was immensely popular. Even today, 25 years later, it remains the best combination of strategy, tactics, depth, and accessibility. It spearheaded the most lucrative business model in gaming, the loot box. 

Overview

I only played Magic the Gathering: Arena beta for about 30 minutes, so forgive the lack of depth in this review.

The game starts with a tutorial, which is reasonably short and fun. For that style of play, Hearthstone is probably overall. After that, I was pushed to play against other players with a beginner deck. More decks and boosters were available for purchase.

The interface itself is well polished. If Hearthstone is the gold standard, MtGA hold up nicely. It still suffers somewhat because instant cards can be played on the opponent's turn, but at least in the tutorial it was handled well.

Who Should Play?

Normally I would say "nobody". If you want more cards you have to buy boosters with real money or grind out coins to buy them slowly. This is the reason I never seriously played MtG and I don't play Hearthstone. It feels too much like "pay to win".

However, MtG has maintained their business for 25 years and is still going strong. The game appeals to a lot of people. If you are willing to sink the money into the game, it might be for you.

Hearthstone and MtG are almost enough fun for me to pay for drafting tournaments. You pay some money, draft some cards from sealed decks, and play a tournament with your draft. When Hearthstone launched, that was a fun option. I don't know if MtGA has that game mode.

Magic is Fun

Magic the Gathering remains to be a very fun game. However, the style has been copied hundreds or thousands of times. There are plenty of deckbuilding games out there that are free, cheap, or offer different play styles. I would only recommend MtGA to someone who is already a fan of MtG and knows what they are getting into.