Here’s a question for you: do you hate spiders? Bear in mind that I’m not asking if you’re afraid of spiders; that’s a very different thing. No, if you’re an arachnophobe you’ll want to steer well clear of Kill it with Fire 2, since it’s wall-to-wall heaving with the little sods. But if you have something against them, some kind of undying grudge that makes you risk life and limb to find and heel-stomp every single spider you see, well then this game is absolutely for you.
My second question here could be “how far do you reckon they can take a game that’s about killing spiders and nothing else?” And the answer is “yes”. Because Kill it with Fire 2 abandons all notions of common sense to deliver a game that is totally, one-hundo-percent about killing spiders no matter where you are.
Whisked away on an interdimensional spaceship (stay with me here), you’re tasked with using a special portal to cross dimensions and hunt down spiders. There are big ones, jumpy ones, ones that shoot web at you, and others that disguise themselves as normal objects and turn into huge glowing tarantulas when you touch them. And your job, across all the myriads realms of the Multiverse (well, a few) is to splat them wherever you find them.
And it gets… creative, let’s say. What begins with you hunting spiders through a recreation of the lounge from the first game, soon leads you through a department store, a mansion, and – my personal favourite – a tiny spider city where you’re basically Godzilla, tossing cars into the sea and demolishing buildings while your quarry panics screams helplessly below you.
No matter where you are, your mission is to find and collect Compound X, a special substance that lets you open locked doors in the ship and in missions. You’ll also find dozens of weapons and gear items, as well as wrenches with which to upgrade said gear at a workbench.
In each mission you’ll also be tracking down the next component you need to open a gate to the next weird universe. You’ve a handy clipboard with which to flatten arachnids or track your progress into mini objectives. Each mission area has a variety of unique challenges and secrets. The aforementioned city mission, for example, wants you to drown spiders by hurling the cars they’re hiding under into the sea, or asks that you destroy billboards or collect the hats dropped by the innocent, terrified little creatures that you can mercilessly slaughter with an actual flamethrower or laser gun.
The world makes no sense in any context but who cares? Kill it with Fire 2 doesn’t concern itself with seriousness and neither should you. Any serious thinking would get in the way of collecting weapons like a nailgun or taser, and who wants that?
Kill it with Fire 2 is hardly what you’d call a clever game, but it is quite fun. The department store level has you playing a version of The Floor is Lava in some areas, where falling into the rising mist will cause you to be swarmed by hundreds of tiny spiders. It’s one of the very few ways you can “die” in this game, as there’s little penalty for failure. New areas are gated by the number of spiders killed, so you’ll need to get used to picking up anything that isn’t bolted down to root out your eight-legged enemy.
There is, of course, a multiplayer element to make use of the cosmetics you can unlock. You can either play together or go head-to-head in a PVP mode. While it’s more manic with other people, it never feels quite zany or dangerous enough to go really wild, and overall Kill it with Fire 2 plays a fairly safe game. But if you really don’t like spiders and all you want to do is squish them in a variety of silly ways in some bizarre locations, you could do a lot worse than Kill it with Fire 2.
