Kiln - Fired Up Edition Upgrade

I came into Kiln fully ready to clown on the concept, and the pottery wheel almost won me over. Sculpting your own fighter before every match is genuinely clever design: the shape and size of your clay creation determines whether you play like a tank, a DPS sprinter, or something in between, and you can swap builds between deaths. A cauldron-type drops a poison puddle near the enemy kiln; a medium pot charges a sword hit that can chunk half an opponent's health bar; one archetype apparently uses a cactus as a weapon, which is exactly the kind of unhinged decision-making I expect from Double Fine. The pottery wheel itself has a real skill curve, with advanced tools unlocking over time that feel like actual tools to master rather than a shallow character creator. But here is the thing: once you leave the wheel, you drop into Quench, which is the game's one and only mode at launch. Two teams of four race to fill their pots with water and douse the opposing team's kiln while fighting through arena hazards, some of which are legitimately creative. Dionysus' Boogie Lounge makes you stop and dance if you step on lit disco tiles. The Anubis map uses floating platforms that drift around a middle island, creating natural chokepoints, though those same platforms expose a deeper respawn problem: fast respawns mean kills barely matter, and the optimal play often punishes anyone who bothers to fight rather than just rolling for the objective. The meta that emerges feels more like pure chaos than depth. The netcode situation is hard to ignore if you care about competitive feel. Multiple outlets reported that the online experience at launch was noticeably rough, with hit registration problems that would make any shooter vet immediately suspicious. For a game that lives or dies on moment-to-moment combat feedback, that is a meaningful strike. Time-to-kill is also inconsistent because match outcome leans so heavily on water delivery rather than defeating opponents, so winning engagements rarely translates to winning rounds. There is no ranked ladder at launch either, so the competitive hook beyond raw skill expression is thin. The Fired Up Edition upgrade itself is a cosmetic bundle: three new glazes, five Kintsugi-base stickers, five warrior-themed attachments, and three developer-made pots. The glazes and stickers are genuinely nice looking, and if you plan to sink serious time into pot customization, the warrior attachments fit well into the game's weird-serious aesthetic. But this is all window dressing on a base game that ships with a handful of stages and a single mode. Progression is handled through gameplay currency only, with no microtransaction layer reported at launch, which is worth acknowledging as a good call. Still, spending on cosmetic extras for a game that the community broadly describes as content-starved is a bet that Double Fine will follow through on its spring update roadmap. If you have a regular squad of four who will all commit to it together, Kiln has genuine warmth and some laughs in its first few hours. The art direction is signature Double Fine: wild, colorful, and inexplicably charming. Solo queue or ranked-ladder chasers looking for a long-term home will run dry fast. The Fired Up upgrade makes more sense once the game has more meat on it.

Fred · Scout Team

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