Quick Review: Kill It With Fire

Suffering from arachnophobia? This is NOT the game for you. Do you hate spiders with a passion, and love to crush those little buggers? This IS the game for you.

It's time to kill. Preferably with fire.

Developed by Casey Donnellan Games LLC, published by tinyBuild and released on August 13th, 2020, Kill It With Fire puts you in the shoes of an arachnid exterminator. This being a video game, you can work that task diligently… but it’s more likely that you’ll fulfill that contract by causing MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF DAMAGE to everything in the area. The base controls is moving around with WASD, attacking with a left click of the mouse, pulling up the spider radar with a right click, reloading some weapons with R and changing your weapon loadout with Q. The most important button is E, through which you can grab an item and then spin it around to view it from all angles and spot a hidden spider. Stuff on shelves, portraits on the walls, under the pillows, on the interior side of the toilet cover… Sure, you can use your radar to roughly know where the spiders are, but you still have to find them!

Oh, and little white spider-babies, too.

As for weapons, you start out with the very clipboard you use to keep track of missions within each environment, but you quickly get your hands on a lighter-boosted spray can (Kill It With Fire indeed), and various firearms. Your targets are small and skitter, so your aim better be good. Twenty or so items can be found to better kill spiders, including cheese puffs that can lure spiders out of hiding for easy kills… but can also make them stronger.

But something’s off. Some of those spiders are… weird. I mean, I can’t speak from experience (I started doing this gig an hour ago), but I don’t think it’s normal for those red and black spiders to split into four, smaller, white spiders when they’re killed… Yeah, that’s fishy. I wonder if there’s any link with those Omega Files I’ve been seeing around the rooms… Fuck me, one spider exploded shortly after I killed it!

You can call me Mr. Frying Pan. And now I'd like you to
meet my friend, who is also a frying pan.

In each level, you must kill a number of spiders to open the door to the exit, but you also have extra missions (an example from the first level: Kill a spider by throwing a book at it). If you complete all of a level’s missions, you unlock a special one called the Arachno-Gauntlet which involves, you guessed it, killing more spiders, albeit with a set weapon. Then, you can look for multiple secrets, such as the Omega Files mentioned earlier; these reveal the greater story. Yep, this silly game has lore.

The household wasn't gonna need those
crops, was it?

And the black-and-yellow ones can do this,
now? Nobody told me being an exterminator
was gonna be this friggin' hard!

A simple style of CGI presenting 10 environments to explore, a decent number of spiders with different abilities to battle (and causing the occasional jump scare), and an even greater number of ways to smash, burn, explode or eliminate them. It’s hilarious to destroy absolutely everything around as you try to get the little buggers to die at last. New weapons, equipment upgrades, and loads of bonus stuff to look for help keep the game fresh to a point, and so do the quests and additional challenges. Still, the base gameplay still involves picking up items to find hidden spiders, which may start to feel repetitive after a bit. I’m bad at aiming at these tiny targets with any of the firearms made available (but, y’know, that may just be a Me problem). Besides, that’s what the spray and lighter are for. Some of the strike weapons (the clipboard, the frying pan, etc.) seemed to glitch occasionally, getting caught in an attack animation loop, thus, not striking the target unless you switched to something else (weapon or radar). Finally, the game is surprisingly CPU-intensive, meaning that many computers will need to run it at the lowest quality setting (affectionately called “potato”), unless players want it slowed to a crawl.

It’s pretty great. Just don’t play it if you suffer from arachnophobia, okay?

Kill It With Fire is available on Steam for 14,99$ USD.