Heat Signature
Worth it · Roguelike · 2017
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $14.99.
- Length
- 14.5h
- Value
- $1.03/hr
- Reviews
- 95% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, Intel HD 5000 or better (GeForce and Radeon tend to be better), 399 MB of storage. Windows only.
Heat Signature is a game from the developers of Gunpoint where you break into spaceships, make terrible mistakes, and think of clever ways out of them. You take a mission, fly to the target ship, sneak inside, and make clever use of your gadgets to distract, ambush and take out the crew.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $2.99. That was December 2020. 50 discounts in the 9 years on record. They run about 60 percent off, roughly 7 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 7 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 6 percent on value. It is pricier than 72 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 92 percent. Among the games that feel like it, FTL: Faster Than Light ($1.99, scores 89) beats it on value, while it beats Battlevoid: Harbinger ($9.99, scores 49).
Critics scored it 79. Players sit 16 points higher at 95 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
1 of the 445 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here comes from a buyer who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 65 percent of the 366 reviews written there were positive, against 95 percent overall, and those are 5 percent of everything written about it.
HowLongToBeat players log 14.5 hours as a typical playtime, and completionists log 36, 2.5 times as much.
The drop-off
87% start to 4% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
21 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Not a fan of the graphics, but the gameplay is so swag money it don't matter yo. Definitely pick this one up during a sale, gets super cheap.
Probably one of my favorite sandbox games of all time, up there (and maybe even beating) just cause 3. The core gameplay loop is what keeps you around, with a wide variety of gadgets and weapons, which interesting and unique ways of using them for you to discover. Lot to learn and a lot of enemies to fight against, keeping you on your toes. Honestly it's been a while since I last played this game, but even so every...
Unbelievable game. Stick to it, it grows on you. Remember to use the pause button when you switch between weapons or devices, the cool down time is only for the last device you triggered.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Heat Signature scores 84/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/268130/heat-signatureThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 2, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.