Lighting the Fuse
There is a very particular kind of catharsis that only this series understands. It is the catharsis of being handed a hairspray can, a lighter, and a moral framework that endorses both. The first KILL IT WITH FIRE took that idea, stretched it across one suburban household, and let players burn the place down in pursuit of creatures the size of a coin. Five years later, Casey Donnellan and the team at tinyBuild have decided that one house, one neighborhood, even one planet, simply cannot contain the scale of grudge a true arachnophobe needs to settle. The sequel goes multiversal, and I played every chaotic minute of it on the Nintendo Switch 2.
What I expected was more of the same with better lighting. What I got was a sequel that genuinely understands what made the first game tick, then proceeds to overengineer it with the kind of confidence you only get from a solo developer who once shipped a major shooter and decided he never wanted to take himself that seriously again. The result is messy, occasionally repetitive, often hilarious, and surprisingly polished on Nintendo’s new hardware. I want to walk you through every layer of it.
What KILL IT WITH FIRE! 2 Actually Is
In broad strokes, this is a first-person action-comedy built in Unreal Engine 5, in which you, the silent and faceless Exterminator, are recruited by a sentient spaceship AI named Darwin to hunt spiders across the entire multiverse. Spiders, it turns out, are not just an Earth problem. They have been invading reality itself. Your job is to find them, find every single one of them, and resolve the situation using progressively unhinged tools.
You start in a homage to the original game’s living room, a clever bit of fan service that doubles as the tutorial, and within minutes you are stepping through a portal into a department store, a haunted manor, a Wild West town defended by spiders in tiny cowboy hats, a slice of cyberspace, a tiny spider metropolis you can stomp like a kaiju, and the literal underworld of Spider Hell. Seven distinct worlds in total, each with its own visual identity, its own arsenal of contextual gadgets, and its own twist on the core formula. You collect Compound X to unlock new areas of the ship, hoard data chips for Darwin’s repairs, and gather wrenches to upgrade your gear at the workbench.
It is, structurally, an arcade-flavored collect-a-thon dressed in a slapstick shooter trench coat. You can play the campaign solo, drop into online co-op with up to three friends, or dive into Spider Hunt, an eight-player PvP mode where half the lobby plays as humans and the other half plays as actual spiders. Yes, you can finally be the thing that ruins someone else’s afternoon.
Gameplay: Forty-Five Ways to Solve a Tiny Problem
The mechanical core is unchanged in spirit but enormously expanded in practice. You walk, you crouch, you sprint, you yank objects off shelves with a frantic physics-driven grab system, and you set fire to anything that holds still long enough. The familiar gestures are all here, including the spectacularly stupid pleasure of clipboarding a wolf spider into the next dimension. What is new is the breadth.
Your arsenal now reaches forty-five weapons and gadgets, ranging from the staples (hairspray flamethrower, rolled-up newspaper, frying pan, pistol) to the genuinely ridiculous (a laser sword, dual pistols, a minigun, a rocket launcher, a remote-controlled tank, and a BFG that does exactly what the name implies). You unlock gear progressively, slot it into a loadout, and upgrade it at the workbench using wrenches scattered throughout each dimension. Upgrade paths are gated behind weapon-specific challenges, which is a smart hook that pushes you to actually experiment instead of locking onto one favorite and never deviating. Mine was the newspaper for most of the run, with the laser rifle as my panic button. I am not proud of how often I needed a panic button.
The spiders themselves have evolved into a much smarter cast. There are jumpers, web-shooters, exploders, ones that spawn other spiders, and the worst of the worst, mimics that disguise themselves as ordinary objects and erupt into glowing tarantulas the moment you brush against them. Picking up a coffee mug now requires emotional preparation. Every world has its own bestiary tweaks, and bosses scattered across the campaign give you set-piece moments where the chaos finally has a focal point.
Where the design philosophy diverges from the original is in the objective structure. The first game funneled you toward a kill quota and let you go feral. The sequel is more interested in puzzles and side challenges: brew magical potions in a cauldron, defend a cactus-themed saloon from waves of arachnids, win a drone race in a virtual reality dimension, demolish a megacity as a giant. The variety is wonderful, but a fair criticism I have to flag is that some of the gating objectives can feel arbitrary. You will occasionally be asked to smash a specific number of windows or collect a precise quota of audio logs to move forward, and that bookkeeping clashes with the otherwise anarchic vibe. When the puzzles work, they sing. When they pile up at the same time, they slow the momentum.
The physics-driven object handling is still slightly janky, just as it has always been in this series. Stacking a chair on a table to reach a vent is more nuisance than it should be, and throwing objects with any precision is an act of faith. I would call it a feature, except some puzzles do expect that precision, and the system does not always cooperate. It is a venial sin in a game this good-humored, but worth knowing.
On Switch 2, the controls feel snappy and responsive. I played most of my run with the Joy-Cons in handheld mode, then docked the system for the co-op sessions, and the gyro aim option is genuinely useful for the finer pest-targeting moments. The shoulder-button-heavy control scheme works well here, and weapon swapping feels immediate rather than tedious.
Story: An Excuse Wearing a Lab Coat
I should be honest about what the story is and is not. It is not a deep narrative experience. It is not trying to be. The setup is functional: Darwin, the AI of an interdimensional ship, recruits you to gather data chips from across the multiverse so the vessel can be repaired and the spider invasion can be ended for good. You travel, you fight, you bring chips home, you repeat. That is the spine.
What the writing does very well is fill the spaces between objectives with personality. The dialogue, delivered through short text exchanges with Darwin and via audio logs scattered through each level, is consistently funny in a dry, deadpan way that reminded me of the tone of late-2010s indie sci-fi shooters. The audio logs in particular are little gems, often from the unfortunate residents of whichever dimension you are currently demolishing, and they add an oddly melancholic flavor to a game that is otherwise pure cartoon violence. There is a recurring undercurrent of “yes, the spider problem is real, but is the cure perhaps worse than the disease,” and the game is self-aware enough to lean into that question without ever giving you a sincere answer.
It is not the kind of story that will linger in your memory the way a narrative-led adventure does. It is more like the spine of a sitcom, a thin premise designed to deliver one absurd scenario after another. For this kind of game, that is exactly the right amount. I would rather have a tight, witty connective tissue than a self-serious arc that gets in the way of the spider-hunting.
The slight cost is atmosphere. The first game had a stranger, almost uneasy mood. Spiders were a real, lurking threat. Strings would swell as one appeared from under a couch cushion, and you genuinely jumped. The sequel trades that creeping dread for slapstick spectacle, and while the trade is largely worth it, I do miss the moments when the original would dare to be a little creepy. The sequel is funnier. The original was scarier. Your mileage will depend on which of those you valued more.
Soundtrack: Strings, Synths, and Saloons
The original game’s score is iconic among the small circle of people who have heard it, built on those sudden Hitchcockian string stings that always announced a spider was on screen and ready to ruin your day. The sequel’s soundtrack, composed by Trevor Whitaker Black, takes that musical DNA and spreads it across genres to match each new world.
The mansion level leans into tense baroque strings, the Wild West dimension shifts into twangy guitar and harmonica that would be at home in a spaghetti western homage, the cyberspace stage drops into pulsing synths and glitchy digital textures, and Spider Hell goes full doom-metal-meets-orchestra in a way that genuinely impressed me. The music is doing real character work, signaling not just the location but the tone of the encounter ahead. The Whitaker Black score is also dynamic, dialing up the tension when a swarm appears and decompressing once the threat is gone, which keeps you in a constant negotiation with your own adrenaline.
The fourteen-track release feels like a genuine labor of love rather than functional underscore. Sound design carries equal weight. The skittering of spider feet is engineered specifically to make the back of your neck twitch, and the satisfying whoomph of a flamethrower igniting against an upholstered armchair lands every time. Speakers on the Switch 2 in handheld do the soundtrack reasonable justice, but I would absolutely recommend headphones to feel the full range, particularly in the underground levels where the low end does a lot of atmospheric heavy lifting.
Player Experience on Switch 2
This is the section I imagine most of you came here for, and I am happy to report that the news is genuinely good. The game is currently a Switch title running through the Switch 2’s backwards compatibility, and the play experience is consistent with the original Switch release, which in practice means a stable framerate, clean image quality, and load times that are notably faster on Nintendo’s new hardware than I had expected from a game built in Unreal Engine 5.
Docked on a 4K TV, the game targets a smooth performance profile that holds up even in the busiest set pieces. I tested it in the kaiju city level, which sends dozens of physics objects flying as you wade through buildings, and I noticed only the occasional micro-stutter when explosions and particle effects piled on at once. In handheld mode on the Switch 2’s larger screen, it looks fantastic. The vibrant color palette and the chunky, semi-stylized art direction work in the game’s favor here. This is not a title leaning on photorealism or fine texture work, so the lower-resolution profile in portable play never feels like a compromise.
Load times between dimensions are short, which matters more than you might think for a game that asks you to portal-hop frequently. The Switch 2’s improved storage performance pays clear dividends. I never had to sit through the kind of long loading sequence that breaks a co-op session’s energy.
Online play deserves a specific mention. Co-op for the campaign supports up to four players, and matchmaking in Spider Hunt PvP for up to eight worked well during my testing window. There was the usual hint of latency in the more chaotic Spider Hunt rounds, but no rubber-banding or desync of the kind that ruins a match. Joining a friend’s session is a quick affair, and the game does a good job of letting drop-in players catch up without resetting progress.
Battery life in handheld mode is reasonable rather than exceptional. I averaged around three and a half hours of continuous play before needing to dock, which is fine for a game that thrives in shorter pick-up-and-play sessions. The file size is light, around three and a half gigabytes, so it slots comfortably into a crowded eShop library.
Where the game inherits weaknesses, those weaknesses follow it onto Switch 2 unchanged. The object physics are still occasionally fussy, the UI is functional but not particularly Switch-aware (no touchscreen menu support in handheld is a missed opportunity), and the level boundaries can feel arbitrary when an object you wanted to lob just stops dead against an invisible wall. None of this is platform-specific. It is the game being itself, and Switch 2 owners get exactly the same experience players on other systems are getting.
What is platform-specific, and very welcome, is how comfortable the whole package feels in handheld form. This is a game that begs to be played in short bursts, ideally on a couch, ideally with someone else losing their mind in the same room. The Switch 2 in tabletop mode with a friend’s Joy-Con or a paired controller is, I think, the way this sequel was meant to be enjoyed.
Is it worth it?
KILL IT WITH FIRE! 2 is the kind of sequel that walks an interesting tightrope. It is bigger in every measurable way, more polished in execution, and more generous with content. It also slightly dilutes the focused, uncomfortable energy that made the original such a strange little cult favorite. I think the trade was the right one to make. Five years on, “more of the same but slightly fancier” would have felt like a missed opportunity. The multiverse hook gives the team room to flex, and the seven worlds genuinely justify their existence rather than feeling like reskinned versions of one base template.
There are real weak spots. The objective-stacking can drag in places, the post-campaign content is thinner than I would have liked, and the physics quirks that defined the original are still here, sometimes endearing and sometimes annoying. The story is functional rather than memorable, which is fine, and the atmosphere is louder and goofier rather than tense, which is a matter of taste.
What I keep coming back to is the simple fact that this game made me laugh out loud more often than almost anything else I have played this year. It made me yelp at jump scares, then laugh at myself for yelping. It made me set fire to an entire saloon to kill one spider that turned out to not even be there. It made co-op sessions devolve into friendly fire incidents and mutual blame. That is a very specific kind of fun that is hard to manufacture, and Casey Donnellan and team have nailed it twice now.
On Switch 2 specifically, this is a clean, well-performing version of a game that is built for exactly the kind of casual co-op the platform excels at. If you are an arachnophobe, you have been warned and probably already know you cannot play this. If you have any tolerance at all for spiders rendered in low-poly cartoon form, and especially if you have someone to play it with, this is one of the easier recommendations I can make this year.
A confident, ambitious, very funny sequel that bites off slightly more than it can chew but does so with such enthusiasm that you forgive the wobbles. Worth your time, worth your friends’ time, and worth keeping installed on the Switch 2 for those evenings when you want to feel powerful, panicked, and ridiculous all at once.
