Kill It With Fire Review – Creepin’ it real

Imagine if you will, that you’ve just moved into a new house. Boxes have been unpacked, cupboards have been filled with fresh groceries and your entertainment system is all set up. In the corner of your eye, you notice it: A small shadow, skittering out of view and hiding behind your valuables. Terror incarnate on eight legs, a multi-eyed monstrosity that wants to poop sticky traps all over your domicile.

What do you do when you’re faced with the horror of a spider? Do you ignore it, and hope that you don’t swallow six or seven of them during the course of your life while you sleep? Or do you proceed to grab a shotgun, blast away at the arachnid anti-christ with a clear disregard for friendly fire and eventually settle on cleaning your house of the vermin with purifying fire? You’re damn right you do.

Kill It With Fire is at its very core, a video game about overreacting. It’s a riff on an old  joke about the best way of dealing with spiders, whether they be harmless fly-catchers providing for their families in a dusty part of your home or walking time-bombs infesting your nearby fuel station supermarket. The goal is simple: Kill spiders, using whatever means are necessary.

To do just that, you’ll unlock an arsenal of weapons along the way: A clipboard with objectives is a useful melee tool, a silenced pistol keeps other nearby spiders blissfully unaware of the arachnid genocide you’re enacting and when all else fails you can douse a location in petrol and set it on fire with a can of hairspray that has been MacGuyvered into a flamethrower.

You won’t just be unloading buckshot in the general vicinity of the eight=legged freaks either, as you’ll need to complete certain objectives to unlock new sections of the stage you’re currently in and eventually get the heck out of dodge. These include mundane tasks such as ringing up a hefty bill at the till to optional objectives such as nailing one of the spider bastards with a pile of books at it tries to escape your unholy rage, but the objective is always the same: Kill spiders, do some chores and find the exit.

You can also upgrade your ability to move and track spiders throughout Kill It With Fire, but there’s not much more to the game than that. It’s an interactive sandbox where you’re an unstoppable vengeful god, enacting biblical levels of death and destruction on the harmless wallcrawlers for the sake of giggles or conquering your own innate arachnophobia. It’s not too long either, there’s some slight replayability when you revisit levels to complete a few bonus objectives and decide to try out some target practice with a loaded revolver that would make Dirty Harry jealous.

A short and sweet distraction, Kill It With Fire is a quirky experiment in overreacting and pest control that’ll hold your attention for an hour or two.

Last Updated: August 12, 2020