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Rising Heat Is Here For All You Twin-Stick Survival Sickos
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Alyssa Mercante
If cramming those influences into one game seems ambitious, that’s because it is. Fuzzy Sock Studios wants to flip the script on the survivor game genre with a momentum-based movement system, among other things. Your ship (which you can choose from a handful of options, along with your pilot, each of which has their own abilities) will move faster based on the direction you’re facing—eyes on the prize and you’ll soar away from and towards enemies with ease, but if you try and keep your guns forward and retreat, you’re a lot slower. A tackle ability allows you to dash forward and leave explosions in your wake, rewarding those who play aggressively.
Haydn Steffes, a producer at Apogee who has worked closely with Fuzzy Sock on development, tells me during a hands-on at Gamescom that the team wanted to take the genre and do something more active with its mechanics, which is where the tackle comes into play. “Most of the games in the survival genre focus on very simple movement. Me and Ronnie [Lusso, Fuzzy Sock’s project lead] come from MOBAs and like more complicated games. We wanted to add some of that flair,” Steffes says.
Rising Heat throws a lot at you quickly, so it’s a bit overwhelming at first (though the team is quick to tell me that you don’t necessarily have to engage with all the high-level build stuff). The combat is fast, and you regularly get access to a shop that sells hacking modules you’ll place into active item slots (of which there are five) displayed on your ship’s cockpit.
These hacks can wildly change your build, and since the shop offers you new, randomized hacks every time, each playthrough can be drastically different—though the ability to re-roll shop items (at a cost) may be a boon for players who have specific build preferences.
You can also fuse modules together, which will help offset debuffs that some of them have, and save you precious item slot space and an integration system lets you pay up to increase the available active slots. You have a few spare slots in your cockpit, which allows for switching modules in and out of the active slots as you play. And though the team makes it clear you can just jump in and twin-stick shoot your way through space, they also mention that Rising Heat is heaven for min-maxers.
“We have play testers that'll completely break builds. That's part of the fun. If you're able to create something super broken, we want to reward people for that,” Steffes says.
The first three modules on offer during my playthrough were Book Smarts, which increased accuracy; Investor, which makes one common item in the shop free; and Loan Shark, which debuffs durability, but gives you one shop currency every time you enter. The next three were Conjure Common, which immediately gives you an “integrated” common hack; Remarkable Revival, which gives you 10 extra health; and Shrewd Sale, which lets you sell a random inactive hack for twice its value.
It’s a lot to take in, but Rising Heat’s actual gameplay is stylish and smooth—point, shoot, dash, move. Chaining your dash charge will double your damage. Turning to face the way you want to flee will get you out of a hot spot fast. And beating a level unlocks a new one, like a side-scrolling map that traps your spaceship in between two force fields.
“The general format of this first map is you're just trying to level up as much as possible in the first 10 minutes or so,” Steffes says. At that time, you have your first boss encounter, and you can no longer level up your build—you just have to hope what you’ve done so far is good enough to get you through it.
Once you beat a level, you’ll unlock a survival mode for that level—and yes, there will be leaderboards for whoever can stay alive the longest.
Rising Heat will also launch with local co-op mode, which links two ships together with a supercharged beam that can lay waste to enemy ships if you work in tandem. Uncoordinated movement could inadvertently drag your teammate’s ship into the danger zone, so put on your best “Get Along” shirt while you sit on the couch together. Though I don’t get a chance to try it out during the hands-on, I can taste the promise of chaos.
The official Rising Heat 1.0 release comes later this year on PC. You can wishlist the game now, right here.