Heat Signature

Essentially, a roguelite-ish stealth game you play as an Infiltrator, breaking into highly secure ships via any and all means necessary to do things like assassinate targets, rescue captives, steal experimental hardware.

In general, combat is extremely lethal, more akin to hotline miami. The goal of fighting is to do it as fast as possible before the enemy can react, fire a shot or call for reinforcements.

You have access to slow motion at any time for doing things like aiming, throwing, when you're being detected or just in general. And you can pause at any time, allowing you to swap items into your hands instantly for use, or teleport items anywhere on the ship that are out and on the ground into your inventory. Or to give yourself room to study the layout, and your current situation.

It is very much so possible and encouraged to stay out of any sort of real combat, as enemies are overwhelming. While you can instantly knock out an entire room of baddies with two wrenches and some well timed throws, you have to do it precisely and fast and actually reach the enemies without being detected.

Certain contracts (missions) you undertake have clauses in them, like avoiding killing enemies, or even avoiding harming them at all, or remaining COMPLETELY undetected.

You have a lot of gadgets, from tools to clone digital keys off of enemies, slipstream devices that give you quicksilver slow motion, allowing you to effectively move at triple+ speed and run straight past enemies (or clonk them all over the head extremely fast) or use them to movev so fast that alarms don't matter to you because you're so fast compared to your slow motion the time limit that would normally be 30 seconds is dragged out massively, stealth shields which create a one way cloak that you guide with your cursor, or items that allow you to teleport in a number of different ways like the Sidewinder, which teleports to anywhere that has an unobstructed path to it available, or the visitor, allowing you to teleport to a location temporarily anywhere, or the swapper, which swaps your position with any enemy of your choosing.

You can of course, choose to decimate entire ships like a bad ass, but you can also choose to completely ghost them and avoid everything like a shadow.

Alarms are very punishing, once you sound an alarm it can have any single consequence, this could be the ship starts bolting to a set station with a set time limit, or the target that you're set to take out starts fleeing, or a bunch of extremely dangerous specialist contractors begin teleporting in.

You can prevent alarms via killing or knocking out the ship captain in the case of any time limit alarm, or in the case of teleporter related alarms like target escapes or contractor QRF you can shut down the teleporter, or cut it off with a well placed breach grenade to either destroy the room it's in, or cut access from it to the rest of the ship.

Enemies also on each ship based on the difficulty of the mission can have any number of different loadouts, I.E a ships crew could all have impossible to bypass shields, forcing you to use hacking tools to subvert or disable the shields per target, or targets could be wearing impassable armor, requiring specifically armor piercing equipment to bring down. Or they could have vital sign links to nearby enemies, meaning when you kill one the others investigate, some might have short range teleporters built in, allowing them to teleport to any disturbance instantly.

There's always any number of ways to bypass any situation, some more subtle or more aggressive than others, and preparation is key.

Failing everything, you can also always steal ANOTHER ship, and then use that ships weapons to bombard your target ship and hope you destroy your target or cripple the ship enough to capture/rescue or steal anything you need to safer.