EARLY ACCESS REVIEW | "Kill It With Fire 2"
I know many a friend who’d burn their house down if it meant killing the spider that invaded it. That sort of mentality is why I loved 2021’s Kill It With Fire, which took exterminating arachnids to the extreme! Three years later, a new adventure destroying eight-legged freaks has arrived, and this time, the crazy has been upped a whole lot. But does Kill It With Fire 2 offer the same amount of spider-stomping satisfaction?
Once again, your mission is to kill spiders. Only this time, you’re no longer on the safe ground of Earth. Instead, you’ve been zapped onto a spaceship, which is having its fair share of spider problems in the most craziest of ways. But in order to get rid of them once and for all, you’ll need to access a Stargate™ to visit new areas, grab new weapons, and complete missions. From old homes and furniture stores to even a spider metropolis, the places you’ll traverse offer unique situations to every arachnid-killing situation.
First the good news: Kill It With Fire 2 is super fun! Whether you are focused on the main mission on hand or trying your best with the side quests, every aspect of Casey Donnellan Games’s sequel is just as grand as its predecessor. From new weapons such as laser pistols and **checks notes** nuclear breath, the amount of room this game gives you to create your own spider-killing mayhem is staggering. But even more staggering are the new pests that you’ll come across.
Objects will turn into spiders. Spiders will give birth to other spiders. Sometimes, there will be spiders acting like soldiers shooting teeny tiny guns. There are spiders with hats! And on a few occasions, there are behemoths that’ll make you want to nuke your home, much less burn it down! But it’s all in the game of exterminator vs. pest, with sometimes the spiders overtaking you in missions involving fog, stealth-crawling through air vents, and more!
What Kill It With Fire 2 does is how a sequel should be. It’s bigger, offers new kinds of content and quests, and even lets you embrace the crazy more so. Perhaps this is why I found myself revisiting the spider metropolis level more than any other, as it allowed me to be the monster of the arachnid world. Even funnier is when you get access to the ultimate spider-killing weapon: the rolled-up newspaper, with hilarious headlines about arachnid massacres with every kill made.
It’s when the game thinks outside of the box when it reaches unique heights. In one level, you’ll find a cauldron, which you’ll use to create potions to better your skills. One such potion will let you turn into a spider, which gives you the chance to climb on walls, leap tall counters, and go incognito with the enemy. Other potions will give you super speed and invisibility will also offer a helping hand when dealing with these arachnids.
The best part: you don’t have to do this alone anymore. You can invite up to three friends to take part in the main campaign that Kill It With Fire 2 offers. Watching as you and your pals do more destruction than actual spider-killing is the kind of silly we need in this world. And if you want to help better their skills, you can invite them on a “Spider Hunt”, which lets you be the spider while they try to take you down. As an eight-legged freak, you can perform wild maneuvers, slow down the exterminators, or simply hide while your enemies tear down the entirety of a surrounding as you laugh at their stupidity.
Alas, even with all this fun at your fingertips, there’s an elephant in the room that needs to be addressed. The aiming in the game feels very off. Even with a spider in the center of my scope, it often feels like it’s missing the shot by mere inches. As such, it leads to some frustrating situations that will result in ammo depletion and a tough time accomplishing goals. Fortunately, with it still being an Early Access game, there’s plenty of time to work out the bugs before it gets the full 1.0 release.
PROS:
- Tons of fun missions
- Weapon assortment is vast
- Solid co-op mode
CONS:
- Aiming is off
- Will give you spider PTSD
FINAL THOUGHTS:
Kill It With Fire 2 does plenty of things right as a follow-up. The missions are great, and playing with your friends easily makes the experience more fun. However, its aiming system is currently a pain, making certain tasks a lot more difficult than they should be. Thankfully, there’s enough spider-annihilating fun here that helps make Kill It With Fire 2 a solid sequel!
EARLY ACCESS RATING:
Promotional consideration provided by Tina Benoit of tinyBUILD games.
