Spiders have invaded, and Kill It With Fire presents only one cure: fire, and lots of it. Well, that, and maybe a shotgun or grenade for good measure. This absurd title takes the often frantic act of chasing down spiders and dials the absurdity up to 11. Glass gets shattered, furniture is set ablaze, and entire buildings can crumble into ruin - all in pursuit of an arachnid-free world. But despite its entertaining premise, a lack of depth causes the novelty and charm to plateau sooner than later.
Dozens of eight-legged creepers infest areas ranging from ordinary bedrooms to secret government bunkers. Hunting essentially boils down to a game of hide-and-seek. Watching for telltale clues like wobbling objects or spider squeals creates an entertaining tension (especially for those who legitimately fear spiders). If the search takes too long, a handheld spider tracker helps avoid aimless wandering. The tracker has its use, especially when spiders get a little too good at staying out of sight. But when all else fails, it’s often more effective, and less annoying, to just burn or smash everything to the ground, negating the tracker's usefulness.
Per the title, blanketing rooms in fire and watching tiny fireballs scatter about is gleefully fun. The overkill reaches new heights with a mostly enjoyable arsenal of weapons including frying pans, weed whackers, and even ninja stars. Guns are also at players’ disposal, but spiders are so small and quick that anything outside of a shotgun blast requires an annoying degree of pinpoint accuracy. At least the stages boast nice destructibility; blowing dishes to smithereens offers a satisfying consolation for whiffing attacks. At the end of each stage, it’s always fun to look around and admire the smoldering remains of what was once an office or living room.
The design doesn’t evolve much, however, so the novelty fades sooner than later. To its credit, Kill It With Fire tries to keep players engaged with various side objectives and new spider types. Unfortunately, even spiders that jump, shoot vision-obscuring webs, and explode on death don’t significantly change the formula, so they’re mildly entertaining wrinkles at best. That’s largely because the player either can’t take damage or can absorb a ton of it, defanging the bugs of any threat they could pose.
The extra objectives aren’t particularly deep or engaging for the most part. Many are as simple as destroying X-amount of a certain object. Others present barebones puzzle-solving, like arranging statues from biggest to smallest. Missions ultimately feel more flat than anything, but they at least feed into the core spider-hunting loop well enough. Completing enough side quests unlocks uninteresting special challenges, such as mini-horde mode battle, that also fail to generate much enthusiasm to pursue a completionist playthrough. Players will satisfy the quota of dead spiders and likely move on with little regret (especially since stages can be replayed).
Unlocking player abilities and tracker upgrades between missions offer a similar shallowness. When players have to earn the right to sprint or to equip the tracker more quickly, that’s a bad sign that there isn’t much there. Cycling through the weapon arsenal also feels clunkier than it should. It stinks to see spiders slip away because players couldn’t light a molotov quick enough.
Kill It With Fire can best be summed up as a competent game wrapped around a much stronger premise. Mindless fun can be had, and it should probably be put in front of actual arachnophobes for the most entertaining results (provided, of course, they're up to the effort - the payoff of victory is quite sweet). These spiders need more bite to keep players coming back after squashing them.
Kill It With Fire is available now for PC. Screen Rant was provided a digital Steam code for the purpose of this review.