Kill It With Fire VR

Don’t get burned

INFO FORMAT PSVR2 [rev], PSVR PRICE £11.99 ETA Out now PUB TinyBuild DEV Casey Donnelan Games PLAYERS 1

Compared to zombies or hellspawn, some folk find spiders more terrifying, so an FPS that has you trying to eradicate the eight-legged freaks sounds like a great idea, and compared to the previous PS4 version, VR feels like a perfect fit. Across nine levels, which take you from the living room to the local convenience store to the office, your mission is to seek out the arachnids hiding among the objects and furniture,1 and then squish, smash, shoot, or indeed burn them out of existence.

Your phobias aside, they’re not exactly a challenge to kill, though you might run into slightly tougher subspecies, such as one that shoots webs to stick your hands in place for a few seconds. But the fun comes from the escalating disproportionate force you use to eliminate them, wielding everything from conventional firearms to lightsabers to a good old-fashioned frying pan, and the destruction you leave in your wake.

We just wish it was better implemented in VR as using the UI to swap between the many different weapons you acquire is quite a faff, as is simply trying to pass a weapon between hands. The hand tracking also feels inconsistent – sometimes it lets us grav-pick an object a few feet away, yet at others it struggles to register a basic handle to open a cupboard or drawer.2

The VR game’s as short-lived as the PS4 version, while the optional objectives that pad out a level rarely have anything to do with killing spiders, though completing them does earn you upgrades to make mass arachnicide easier. If you’ve killed them with fire once already, however, the promise of doing it again in virtual reality isn’t quite so tantalising.

FOOTNOTES 1 Their skittering sound alone is enough to unnerve you. 2 A pre-launch bug that repeatedly crashes the game at the title screen hardly helps.