Kill It With Fire – Arachnophobe’s Worst Nightmare

Kill It With Fire starts you in a normal home, but it doesn’t take long to find a spider hiding from you. This is something most of us have experienced in our lives. But you soon learn this game has way too many spiders lurking in it than you would ever want to see in real life. Though personally, I would like to see none.

What to do when facing a spider? Some people like to protect these small creatures, but to others, they are a source of immense fear and need to be terminated immediately. In this game we are heavily leaning toward the latter option, at least on how we deal with the spiders; our character does not seem to be all that much scared of them.

Your goal is to kill the spiders in any way possible. And I do mean any. When progressing through the levels you can find different kinds of equipment to end the lives of the little crawlies from pistols to frying pans and even C4s. In the end, you will have quite an impressive arsenal at your disposal. You find from one to three of these per level and that ensures you have time to try out each of them. I had my favourites in the end that I kept using, but it is nice to have options to play with.

You can also find upgrades, modifiers, and batteries in the levels. With the upgrades, I felt that there was an imbalance in that some of them felt way better than others. Modifiers were fun, but a feature that was not paid much attention to due to there only being two modifiers. That is just way too few and made me question a bit why have them at all. Batteries are for activating these upgrades and modifiers in the menu. Collectibles in this game weren’t too hard to find. You do have to keep your eyes open and hope that the batteries, being smaller items, don’t get lost in the chaos.

And there will be chaos. But don’t worry, Kill It With Fire does also have some structure. During the levels, you have different kinds of objectives to complete. You carry a handy clipboard that displays these and doubles as the starting melee weapon. Tasks can be either found in the level as sparkling papers or you can just try to complete them blindly. None of the objectives were very hard and it was fun to accidentally complete some while messing around in the game.

Levels can be beaten by just killing enough spiders to open the different doors, but I recommend collecting and doing objectives. This way you get new ways of playing with the different items and even open harder challenges for yourself to beat. Even if I’m a player who likes to get everything, I do like that the game allows the player to progress without forcing them to do a laundry list worth of stuff. Sometimes it is nice to just smack some spiders and move on.

I think this game relies on the action to be fun, and you are not going to find a deep story here. At the beginning, you might think there is no story at all and that is understandable as there is really no narrative going on. You move from location to location in this town killing spiders and it does not feel any deeper. During the last two levels, we do end up witnessing some events that give the game a story at least on some level.

At the core, the game is just fun. It’s probably not for people with severe arachnophobia, but even myself, who fears spiders, found a lot of fun time to be had here. The game is not trying to scare you and it felt more like power fantasy against the eight-legged creatures. When completing a level, I was always surprised at how long I had played. So, if you sit down to do some spider hunting, be prepared to lose your sense of time.

Information
Developer: Casey Donnellan Games LLC
Publisher: tinyBuild
Release date: 13.08.2020
Platforms: Windows, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, iOS, Android, VR
Genres: Action & adventure, simulation, shooter
PEGI: 7
Photos: screenshots from Kill It With Fire (Casey Donnellan Games LLC), taken by the author

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