Bread and circuses keep the populace entertained, but if the entertainment is good enough you can probably skimp on the bread. The Rising Heat tournament pits fighter pilots from star systems far and wide against the densest hordes and biggest bosses the arena can handle, pulling in cash and prizes, but most importantly, letting you destroy a few hundred ships and creatures while turning a semi-useful gun and handy dash attack into powerful weapons of enemy obliteration.
Dash and fire and never slow down
The basic setup will be familiar to anyone who’s enjoyed Vampire Survivors and the dozens of games that have been influenced by it over the last couple of years. There’s one of you, lots of them, and the starting ship will be nothing like the one you’ve upgraded to at the end of a run. Every new level is a choice from among three powerups, each of which offers a major and a minor upgrade (or sometimes a downgrade for the powerful upgrades) and which of the starting ships you choose determines what the best options are. A ship configured around the dash attack, for example, might want to layer on a few shot upgrades due to there being enemies that charging into won’t work against, but playing towards its strengths is a good idea as well. Oddball upgrades also have their place, because while min/maxing is efficient, there’s more to gaming than spreadsheet optimizations.
Review: Vampire Survivors
Vampire Survivors is a long slow burn that never stops getting hotter, maybe not quite the first of the genre it ignited, but certainly the best.
While the powerup system is nice and familiar, one of the big elements that sets Rising Heat apart from other games in its genre is its heavy focus on momentum. The ship feels weighty and slow at first, which isn’t an entirely inaccurate impression, but one of the major survival skills is managing its inertia. Forward is faster than strafing or reverse, and the dash adds a blast of speed that leaves the ship at top speed when done. Granted, there’s a cooldown period, but there’s a good-sized window of invulnerability to most enemies and destroying at least one during the dash instantly resets it.
Got a swarm? Several dashes through it knocks it down to size and will also do nice things to the experience meter. The problem is not everything is destructible so you can’t be careless. During my play-through I was mostly dash-focused, but seeing as that was a total of two rounds one year apart, there’s a lot of room left to see what options a gun-based build can offer.
The Rising Heat trailer dropped today to finally announce the game, and it doesn’t look like it will be much longer for everyone to get a crack at it in demo form. The official release window is Q1 2025, but the trailer ends with the promise of a demo dropping at an as-yet undefined “soon.” I’ve enjoyed both times I’ve gotten to see Rising Heat, with the ship feeling good to control once you learn what it needs to be effective, and while I didn’t get to test the two-player mode that’s influenced by the old vector Asteroids clone Space Duel, where two ships are tethered together and can be extremely powerful if they can just figure out how to coordinate, it’s hard not to appreciate the reference.
It’s hard to say when the demo is coming and the release window is a long way off, but with Rising Heat officially announced, we can at least start looking forward to it properly.
