KILL IT WITH FIRE! 2 Review Summary

Exceptional Sequel, Highly Enjoyable: Players overwhelmingly praise the game as a significant improvement and worthy successor to the original. It's lauded for being fun, engaging, and offering great value, often exceeding expectations and receiving high ratings.

Satisfying Spider Extermination Mechanics: The core gameplay of killing spiders with diverse weapons and methods is highly enjoyable and satisfying. Many players, including those with arachnophobia, find the game cathartic, with specific modes like 'Spider Hunt' adding to the fun and even helping alleviate fear. Special levels like Arachnitopia provide unique chaotic spider-killing opportunities.

Rich Content, Story & Exploration: Players appreciate the game's substantial amount of content, including an interesting and well-voiced story mode, engaging missions, puzzles, and numerous collectibles and secrets. This variety contributes to high replayability and exploration, with a decent amount of lore.

Extensive & Varied Weapon Arsenal: The game features an expansive arsenal of weapons, including both returning favorites and many new, often exaggerated, options. Players enjoy collecting, upgrading, and utilizing the wide variety of tools to eliminate spiders, finding them fun and effective.

Diverse and Expansive Level Design: The game's levels are praised for their unique themes, larger scale, and varied mechanics, offering a mix of exploration and chaotic gameplay. Each map provides a distinct experience with its own challenges and humor.

Sequel Deviates, Lacks Focus: Many players find the sequel a significant disappointment compared to the original. It's criticized for deviating too much from the first game's core spider-killing concept, introducing bloated, tedious, and confusing mechanics like excessive collectibles and out-of-place minigames. The game feels less charismatic, often overwhelming, and struggles to maintain its original charm and engaging gameplay loop.

Incomplete Content, Slow Updates: The game is widely perceived as unfinished and lacking substantial content, despite a prolonged early access period. Players report short campaign lengths, easily achievable 100% completion, and numerous features or levels marked as "coming soon" that remain unreleased or unupdated. This leads to frustration over the perceived abandonment or slow development pace.

Frequent Crashes, Game-Breaking Bugs: The game is plagued by severe technical issues, including frequent fatal errors and crashes that often make specific levels, like the IKEA level, unplayable. There are also reports of general multiplayer instability and occasional game-breaking glitches that can permanently prevent progression or access to the game.

Imbalanced, Unfun PVP Mode: The player-versus-player (PVP) mode receives strong criticism for its lack of balance and overall enjoyability. Players specifically point to forced imbalanced team compositions (e.g., 1 exterminator vs. 3 spiders), weak spider abilities (e.g., ineffective webs), and other mechanics that make the mode feel unpolished and not worth purchasing the game for.

Spiders Are Overly Frightening: Several players find specific spider behaviors and designs excessively frightening or discomforting. This includes spiders jumping onto the visor, the visual and sound effects of morph spiders, swarms of small spiders from eggs, and frequent, loud skittering noises that heighten anxiety and sometimes negate gameplay mechanics like the SPIDAR.

Robust Co-op and PvP Modes: Multiplayer is a major feature, offering a comprehensive co-op campaign that supports up to four players. Additionally, there's a unique 4v4 'Spider Hunt' PvP mode where players can either be exterminators hunting hidden spiders or play as spiders themselves in a hide-and-seek format, employing abilities like placing cobwebs.

Diverse Spider Extermination Gameplay: The game's core loop heavily features killing spiders using a vast and creative arsenal, ranging from everyday objects to advanced weaponry. Players assume the role of an exterminator, utilizing tools like flamethrowers, lasers, and even nuclear options across various environments. This central theme is complemented by other mission objectives and exploration.

Shifted Focus to Collectibles/Puzzles: Compared to its predecessor, the game exhibits a significant shift towards a 'collectathon' style, emphasizing the discovery of numerous hidden items and solving environmental puzzles. While spider elimination remains a component, it often takes a secondary role to exploration and completing various tasks, altering the overall gameplay experience.

Game is in Early Access: The game is currently in early access, meaning it is not yet fully complete. The main story mode is still in development, with the final level and additional content anticipated to be released in future updates. This status is important context for the current state of the game.

Expansive Lore & Multiverse Setting: The game features an intricate narrative set within a multiverse, involving a spaceship, interdimensional portals, and diverse alien environments populated by unique entities like talking cacti and spider civilizations. Lore is further explored through in-game audio logs and peculiar elements such as transforming spiders into butterflies.

Smooth Performance & Steam Deck Ready: Players consistently report that the game runs very smoothly, even on less powerful computers and particularly well on the Steam Deck. This includes out-of-the-box compatibility and pre-configured gamepad settings, enhancing the portable gaming experience.

Resolved Update Playability Issue: One player initially encountered an issue preventing gameplay after a new update. However, they were able to find a fix for this problem, suggesting it was either a temporary glitch or a user-resolvable configuration conflict.

Airlock Wall Glitch: A specific bug allows players to clip through the bottom wall of the HSF Vindicator's Airlock when transformed into a spider. This enables out-of-bounds exploration of the void while in human form with a jetpack or drone, highlighting a specific geometry collision issue.

Conditional Recommendation for Sequel: Many players recommend the game, especially those who enjoyed the first installment and seek more content and depth. However, a significant portion advises waiting until the game leaves Early Access or is on sale, due to its current state. Some also suggest playing the first game to understand the story or fully appreciate the sequel.

Generally Positive Player Ratings: Despite being in Early Access, the game receives high praise and strong ratings from many players, often scoring 8/10 or 10/10. Reviewers highlight its entertaining blend of destruction and strategy, calling it hilarious and a notable sequel.

Strong anticipation for updates.: Players eagerly await ongoing development, new content, and the completion of story mode, acknowledging the game's early access status. There's also a desire for the game to address current issues before the 1.0 release and a defense against claims of abandonment.

Enhance Spider Hunt mechanics.: Players suggest improvements for the 'Spider Hunt' mode, including reducing spider noise, improving web mechanics (silent placement, meaningful slowdown, fixing jumps), expanding map variety, adding more hiding spots, limiting explosive ammo, and allowing exterminators to control room doors in multiplayer.

Request for Workshop support.: Players explicitly request the integration of Steam Workshop support, indicating a desire for community-created content to enhance the game's longevity and variety.

Game appeals to arachnophobia.: The game effectively engages players with arachnophobia, providing an interesting experience that can either help confront fears or induce a horror-like feeling. One specific suggestion was to hide spider nametags from exterminators.

Current content playtime.: Reviewers estimate the current game content offers approximately 4-6 hours for near-completion, with an anticipation of an additional 2 hours from future levels. This provides a clear expectation for game length in early access.