Kill It With Fire Review – Silly VR Spider Squashing

Kill It With Fire PSVR 2

Kill It With Fire from developer Casey Donnellan Games tailored a well balanced game to carry out its goal. The game has been around for a while. First, it has been released flat on every platform. Casey Donnellan Games have also done it in VR for the Meta and Steam platforms. Now it is making the leap to VR, and this review is for the PSVR 2 version. When you ask someone what creatures freak them out the most, the top two answers would be spiders and snakes. The phobia is so strong for each of them that there is a whole sub-genre of movies that pit characters against them.

Kill It With Fire knows this and adroitly balances between a game scary but also very fun. The game employs a cartoony, brightly colored visual style that softens the overall tone. How strongly a gamer reacts to stomping out spiders will totally depend on whether you instinctively abhor them.

Where the game tightens the tension, is with the sound design. The game’s music, which uses strident violins, enhances spider sightings. Its effect is excellent. When those violins kick in, you get a visceral reaction much the same as the music cues from movies such as Jaws or Psycho. It really invokes the sensation of a multi-legged creature scurrying across the floor. Or maybe up on you!

Keeping the fear factor in mind, Kill It With Fire, has an option to turn off that particular music cue if you find it too unnerving. Or maybe it becomes too irritating for you. Personally, I think it does the game a great disservice to turn that sound cue off. The music in the game is an upbeat, jazzy, spy type affair that is an excellent contrast to the spider music cue.

Scare Versus Comfort

Another comfort option is the one that deals with spiders that jump. If jumping spiders are too creepy for you to handle, you can disable it. Again, if you do so, it takes away an awesome creep factor, dare I say it, jump scares. If you can remind yourself that it’s only a game, then do your best to leave this setting enabled.

Let’s talk about the spiders. There are a variety of them, but they all look very similar to one another. The arachnids scale up in size as you gain better items to dispatch them. They move realistically as they scurry around the room. They crawl up, over, under, behind, and in between items.

The game starts in your typical bungalow style home with each room filled with interactive objects. All you have is a pair of gloves that come equipped with a spider radar to start with. The game prompts you to hunt out and kill spiders. Kill so many spiders and you open up more weapons. One of the first items is a hair spray flame thrower in honor of the game’s name.

The first levels are small. You move around a living room, a bathroom, and an office. Weaponless, you can use your fists or can pick up household items to squash spiders. It’s up to you to suss them out and dispatch them. You can use household items like TV remotes, speakers, game controllers to squash them. It makes some for tense moments as the spiders zip around the room and climb furniture to escape you.

Going Bigger

From there, everything gets progressively bigger: the stages, the weapons, and the spiders. Quickly enough, you power up enough, and killing spiders changes from being scary to becoming comedic. It’s an understandable evolution of the gameplay. The experience is meant to be fun instead of scary. Personally, I would have preferred the game to take the scary route and pay off with a Lord of the Rings – The Return of the King – Shelob level of confrontation.

As your array of weapons grow – flame thrower, guns, ninja stars, and bombs to name a few. With such an arsenal at your disposal, the difficulty level drops while the collateral damage increases dramatically. This is how the game combats the boredom that can arise with a repetitive gameplay loop in several ways.

First, the game is short. You can complete it in a handful of hours. Next, the game gives you objectives that require you to be creative with your kills. One example is you have to kill six spiders with a gun, but only with five bullets. You access the objectives through your Arachno-Gauntlet.

Finally, the art style and aesthetics of the game are geared towards a younger crowd. Ten to twelve-year-olds will have a blast with this game. This is not a deep game, but it ties in adroitly with the fear of spiders and the desire to get rid of them.

Kill It With Fire Is A Well Balanced Game

Casey Donnellan Games has tailored a well balanced game to carry out its goal. Kill It With Fire hits the right mix of fun and length. If you are an arachnophobe, this may not be the game for you. If the idea of squashing spiders for fun appeals to your darker side, this is the game for you. Kill It With Fire is available on all platforms, be it flat or VR. And now it has come to the PSVR 2. Happy Hunting!

***Kill It With Fire PSVR 2 code provided by the publisher***