I would imagine that making sequels to decent games has to be a bit of a challenge, looking to balance preserving what worked originally with some ambition to expand the scope of the gameplay to also make something better. Of course, not all follow-ups are successful ones, and the problems can range from losing the thread of the original experience, to accidentally exposing its limits by expanding the size of the sandbox you’re operating in. 

Kill It With Fire was a fun and relatively simple VR-like experience, with you working through objectives while trying to deal with periodic creepy crawlies, with my preferred weapon of choice being the lighter and hairspray, even if it had a tendency to catch the house on fire. With this follow-up it would be a fair to ask the question of what you could do to improve on that simple formula, and it appears the developers went with breaking away from a simple household setting into ones that are much more exotic. In the campaign, you’ll be working from a base set in space, opening up a portal that will take you to a variety of locales, each with their own new weapons, objectives to complete, and of course some spiders as well. There’s no question that this adds some novelty, the potential for some new surprises, and some flavor, but it also quickly starts to feel like it ends up pulling the formula pretty thin.

One problem I had is simply with the color schemes in some locations, and how they can make spotting spiders almost painful at times. Darker colors are perfect for the typical spider to blend into, and when you add in the awkward shape of some items in the environment, it can be aggravating tracking things down. Another issue is that while the balance of objectives and finding new ways to deal with spiders felt more balanced in the original, here it can feel like the objectives are in charge, with spider killing more often as an afterthought. Granted, the objectives offer the puzzle element of gameplay, and those can be fun, but a lot of them also feel like they’re simply tasking you with searching around everywhere for a certain number of a specific item, and that’s not very satisfying either. The last issue I have is that so many of the weapons are awful to try to aim and shoot at pretty nimble little arachnids with, and when key objectives require you to get kills with a specific weapon that kind of doubles down on the frustrations. There are at least some that have no such fine-tuned aiming requirements, and those tended to be what I stuck with, especially since some are so inherently goofy that it’s hard not to stick with them.

There’s also a multiplayer-focused online Spider Hunt mode, but as I always end up emphasizing in these reviews, unless you know someone else you’ll specifically be playing with, there’s little chance that the community around this game will keep its legs for more than a few weeks, if it even lasts that long. I’ve just seen too many people get their hopes up with what are sometimes fun online modes in titles like this, only to see lobbies turn into ghost towns far too quickly. Throw that in with the Campaign being a nice expansion on the world established by the original, but feeling like it has little of substance to add in the process, and this may be good for digital spider killers, but for everyone else perhaps not so much.