Welcome to the Warthog Report, the home for my fiction and non-fiction. This post is part of the regular feature ‘Let Me Talk To You About,’ where I ramble about creative works of any medium that I enjoy. You can adjust which segments you receive here. Today this is about an unfortunately topical fighting game.
With the recent heatwave I realized it was a fitting moment to finally try out the indie fighting game titled Heatwave.
The game has a low-res pixel art style that keeps the graphics simple with just the basics of the characters designs, it’s not my preferred art style but I liked the way some stages looked. Both the character select screen and story mode show the characters in more detail.
Before choosing your character you are given a choice between different modes, speed, power, team, and the unlockable ex mode. Which mode you pick determines what set of mechanics you’ll use, like what kinds of attacks can cancel into each other or how your character can jump.
Team mode is the most different of the modes. Normally after picking your character you are then prompted to select another character who can be called in for an assist attack, your options span the entire playable roster plus a few assist only characters. In team mode you instead pick another playable character to form a tag team, swapping in and out during the match until both are defeated.
When you’re just starting out I’d advise not picking team mode due to its added complexity, like having to learn two characters. From my own experience I feel power is the one you should pick when playing for the first time due to being the simplest.
Once you get past the complexity on the character select screen, the actual gameplay proper isn’t as complicated if you’ve played other fighting games before. Special move inputs are standardized, you can reliably use quarter circle forward, quarter circle back, or two down presses to do a special move on any character, making it easy to quickly learn the basics of any character. Though some character specific gimmicks I found a little difficult to grasp, and didn’t notice any in game explanation of them.
There is no built in online play, but what the game does have are unlockables and a proper story mode, in addition to the usual batch of modes like arcade and training.
Heatwave is set in a distant future where the crash of a meteor has led to magic becoming widespread, but rising temperatures have left the Earth largely abandoned. Those who remain on Earth rely on magic to lower the temperatures in their area as the rest of humanity lives either on the moon or in the parallel dimension of the underworld.
Story mode starts by following Robin, the person in charge of maintaining the cooling magic sigils for their settlement, who ends up with a curse that leaves them unable to use magic. With the fate of the entire settlement dependent on their cure, Robin sets out with their friend V to get Robin’s magical ability back.
From there story mode opens up into an ensemble with multiple interweaving threads to follow, like an engineer trying to return to the moon after a spaceship crash or a woman’s hunt for revenge. You pick different chapters to play through and will need to jump between all of the different branches to keep the story going. Not every chapter has a fight to play through, it takes its time to build up to the major fights.
Reflecting the game’s assist/team system the cast generally break up into teams of two, which keeps things easier to juggle, though sometimes there will be solo fights without those mechanics. And because it’s mainly following duos the story is focused on relationships, with a lot of romance and moments of intimacy that fade to black for rating reasons.
Even if you lose a fight in story mode the game will let you continue to the next scene anyway if you wish. I found the fights to be difficult when just learning the game even with difficulty on easy (the default setting), with enemies doing extensive combos while I’m struggling to identify what my character can do. You also don’t get to pick which of the modes your character uses for a fight in story mode, which ends up being a lot to learn and get used to on the fly. There isn’t any tutorial within story mode, so be sure to check the game’s tutorial before starting it.
Not every branch of the story goes all the way to end, some characters bow out of the narrative once their particular arc is done. While in general I liked this approach for handling an ensemble, some characters I felt left the story too early or too completely. The characters I was most interested in had all left the stage by the time the finale came around.
It was also surprising when I realized some characters’ movesets only reflect how they are during specific windows of time in story mode, leading to one case where the graphics in battle conflicted with the story. But for the most part the game is good at updating things to reflect the story and only having characters fight when their moveset makes sense for them to have.
Around the end I felt the pacing ended up in a strange spot, where after raising the stakes there are several chapters of slow relationship drama that I did not find compelling and got tired of. It took me out of the game a little.
I did enjoy it overall however, and even the rough spots tended to be rough in an interesting indie way. To me the highlight was the climax of Setsuna and Sparrow’s arc, where everything that had been building with them came to a head and had ramifications for the larger story even as they made their exit from it.
Also I know some people will have their opinion influenced by the fact that the roster is majority gay and/or transgender. There are even pride flags in the background of some character’s homes.
Playing through story mode will also unlock some more characters for the roster, including variations of some starting characters and fully unique characters. There are two secret characters who will require a bit of extra effort however.
To unlock a certain character who appears in the story you need to first clear story mode and then beat arcade mode at a difficulty higher than ‘easiest’ without using continues, and then defeat that character in the following battle (you can use continues after reaching their fight). Another fighter can be unlocked by reaching the tenth round of survival mode as Robin, Crow, Sparrow, or Hawke and defeating them.
While the game isn’t perfect or perfectly to my taste, I find it a better offering than a big budget fighting game that just expects you to grind online matches. It also only costs ten dollars with no paid DLC seasons to keep up with. I spent enough time thinking about where story mode left one character that I started writing a short fanfic about him and he’s not even my favorite, which is a good sign of how compelling I found it.