🕷️🕸️ Kill It With Fire | Review | Nintendo Switch | 8/10 | "You are a pest exterminator, albeit one that has scant regard for the property of others." 🕷️🕸️ @caseydonnellan #GameDev #IndieGames

If like me, you struggle with arachnids then Kill It With Fire will be an experience that has you running the emotional gamut from twisted, sadistic pleasures to creeping fear and tension.

You are – seemingly – a pest exterminator, albeit one that has scant regard for the property of others. Throughout the game, you’ll clear various locations in a town of a quite serious infestation of large spiders.

You’ll begin by finding yourself picking up and gingerly rotating picture-frames and other household items, unveiling the sneaky critters before clowning them with the back of your clipboard or a blast of flame from an aerosol can but pretty soon you’ll be wielding heavy weaponry and launching Molotov cocktails into hay bales and office cubicles to clear them out.

A game built in the Unity engine, Kill It With Fire has a very familiar physics engine and visual style. I also found that on Switch, the frame rate had a target of 30fps but could feel slightly jerky in some environments and when multiple explosions take place, I had flashbacks of Goldeneye on the N64 in this regard, as I threw a load of C4 around in a bid to take out the 8-legged freaks.

The game is presented from a first-person perspective and so your character is unseen and remains silent, this has a quite funky, sinister effect during the latter stages of the game, which I won’t divulge here. 

Whilst your character cannot be hurt, freely walking through fire and getting caught in explosions, you DO have set objectives during each location which you find by exploring.

There are sub-rooms in each place that are opened by killing a set number of spiders and the other quests vary depending on where you are. In a home, it could be smashing up a certain number of picture-frames or emptying a fridge whilst a level in the market may require you to set fire to bales of hay, it’s all good, destruction-based fun! There are also some hidden rooms and objectives for the completionists.

The music in Kill It With Fire is very tongue in cheek, with light jazz and muzak peppering your journey, the lightness in the audio pretty much exactly ties up with the cartoonish violence and mayhem that your character causes making it a very tonally balanced experience.

I had a really good time with Kill It With Fire, I never got bored of smashing my way through the stages and enjoyed discovering some of the secrets. It’s a shame that this is locked at 30fps due to the Switch’s limitations as the spiders are relatively small and that extra smoothness would make aiming slightly more nuanced.

That said, the fact that your character can’t die means that it’s not like you are reliant on ultra-smooth gameplay in life and death scenarios and when you are torching everything with a flamethrower, you hardly need a sniper scope.

For the 3-4 hours, I spent with the game, I was entertained by its charms and simple structure. Upgrades to your spider scanner and weapons are available but don’t make a huge impact on gameplay, although they are fun to locate and unlock.

There are also extra challenges that need to be completed to get the true ending. As much as I enjoyed the game, after completing all of the stages I don’t think I’d personally want to 100% it but the replay value is there for those that do.

Right, I’m off to check under the toilet seat…