In all, Kill It With Fire is shockingly fun for its simplicity. A game that wields excessive violence against the spider menace as many have wanted to do for so long, or perhaps at least joked about doing. The environments are very quaint and nice, which makes the surprising amount of destruction gamers can pull off all the more entertaining and appreciated, and the spiders that fill them are smart and sneaky little buggers since they can and will hide behind objects… including debris if gamers are a bit too eager to blow everything sky high. Definitely a worthwhile title if you want to kill some spiders.

This is facile, but in the best way. A big, dumb, silly game of making a giant mess. And that can prove pretty cathartic – getting to smash up stuff is always a fun release. It reminds me of that children’s game show of the early ’90s, Finders Keepers. And who doesn’t want to get to do that? Plus arachnid genocide.

Whilst Kill it With Fire is a short experience, there’s still enough here to justify the budget asking price. It’s the kind of game that you’re unlikely to return to after having completed it, but you probably already expected that. It might not have the legs to be an epic saga, but if you want a few hours of silly enjoyment then you could do a lot worse than picking up this game.

It is what it is – an effective and stupidly addictive spider-killing and house-smashing game. There is, quite honestly, nothing more to say other than… kill it with fire.

It still lacks tension, something that I suspect could be fixed by patching in a hardcore “damage” mode, and spider-hunting is, at its core, repetitive. But Kill It With Fire gives you the resources to turn a mundane activity into glorious, cartoony, house-torching mayhem. Best experienced in short bursts, if you only play one spider-murder sandbox this year, play Kill It With Fire.

If you’ve got a rainy afternoon and not much to do, Kill It With Fire will slot in nicely for a few hours of entertainment, although there may not be a high degree of replayability if the combat system doesn’t suit your tastes.

I will give Kill It With Fire credit for running smoothly on my PC and being a bug-free (groan) experience from the start to finish of its uncommonly short run time. The one fear-inducing music cue it uses repeatedly was worth a half-chuckle the first time I heard it, so I will give credit there. I don’t feel like there is anything here I can recommend to players unless they are deathly afraid of spiders or want to fake scream for a livestream show or two. The spiders can’t even hurt you, so the stakes here are literally zero for those not already stricken with bug phobia.