In the years since the rise of the cultural juggernaut that is the meme, Kill It With Fire is the only game I can think of that is based on an example of this staple of our time. We’ve all probably seen the various forms of this, where there’s a photo of a girl with a sinister smile in front of a burning home stating something along the lines of “I got the spider.” If you haven’t seen this, I am sure you’ve seen something similar, and that’s essentially the premise of this game. Whether you think this is a funny meme or not will determine how much you actually enjoy this game.

Kill It With Fire is devoid of any type of narrative and simply puts you in various locations. These range from regular domiciles of a few different sizes, gas stations, and goes as far as a bunker or office building, tasking you with using some extreme tools of destruction to destroy (mostly) everyday house spiders that come in a few flavors at an attempt to drive some variety into what is mostly a one-note game. Each location has a few objectives that center on killing spiders, finding items, or just interacting with the game world in unique, albeit occasionally annoying ways. Most of the objectives center on arachnid-genocide, but it becomes clear early into this game that it’s easier to just blow up or destroy everything you can and let the rest sort itself out. Each level has at least one objective that is a little more obtuse, such as moving items around and relocating them in a specific place, or my least favorite – scanning $100.00 worth of items from a gas station, with a limit of 10 items in the transaction (Fast Fact: the frozen pizza adds up quickly, which I discovered after about an hour of trial and error). This was the U-Scan from Hell.

The overall aesthetic of the game reminds me of most of the less polished VR games on the market, and in my honest opinion, the addition of a VR mode would’ve elevated this game beyond a short diversion with mild comedic value to something with real substance. The only aspect that really troubled me visually was how the fire mechanics run. You can realistically set just about everything in the game on fire, but even when lighting up curtains, which anyone who’s experienced a house fire knows are the first thing to spread, they just kind of turn black and smolder, never expanding naturally as the title would allude.

One of the biggest annoyances I had with this game is how damn hard it is to find the spiders amid the destruction, even with the patented spider tracker that looks a lot like the paranormal scanner from Ghostbusters. On more than one instance, I had to start levels over because even while using this tool and wandering around the designated area, no spiders were to be found, and my kill count was the sole reason for holding me back from the next area.

As usual, I let my son sample this game, and as a young boy at the age of eight, he thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish; giggling with every swing of a frying pan, every shot of hairspray into a Zippo, and each rocket launched. Sadly, my wife wanted nothing to do with this title and insisted on leaving the room as soon as either of us booted up the game, so if you need some quality alone time from the arachnophobe in your life, this might serve an additional purpose for you. So, with this being said, one out of three really loved this game, where I grew bored of it within the first hour.

I am from the camp of people who in most cases will try to relocate spiders I find in my home to an exterior structure or just place them outside, so it kind of went against my nature to smack the digital arachnids that can do absolutely no harm to the player outside of occasionally obscuring the field of vision with webs, or jumping at you as a form of a cheap jump scare. I know I am weird because I like spiders, but there are millions of cat owners who go about living their lives smelling of cat piss without batting an eye. Unless you’re a young boy who adores the idea of smashing tiny creatures, or you wish to torture someone you love (or hate I guess), Kill It With Fire will likely have you creeping towards something with more substance.

6 out of 10

Pros

• Some Absurd Yet Hilarious Tools of Arachnocide
• Great For Creeping Out The Arachnophobes in Your Life

Cons

• Relies On a Simple Premise That Gets Old Quickly
• Some Annoying Objectives
• Who Pays $10 at a Gas Station for a Frozen Pizza?

Kill It With Fire was developed by Casey Donnellan Games LLC and published by tinyBuild. It launched on Mobile, NS, PC, PS4, and X1. The game was provided to us for review on Xbox and played on XSX. If you’d like to see more of Kill It With Fire, check out the official site.

 

Here at GBG we use a rating method that you are more than likely familiar with – a scale of 1 to 10. For clarification, we intend on using the entire scale: 1-4 is something you should probably avoid paying for; 5-7 is something that is worth playing, but probably not at full price; 8-10 is a great title that you can feel confident about buying. If you have any questions or comments about how we rate a game, please let us know.

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