Note: Since Spare Parts is a cooperative game, IGN Editors Kristine Steimer and Colin Moriarty played the game together and collaborated on the review.
On its surface, Spare Parts looks like it could be a fun game. There are cute robots with wicked cool dance moves, Simon Pegg of Shaun of the Dead lends his pipes for the only vocal character, and its platforming and collecting focused gameplay is of the classic, tried-and-true variety. Unfortunately, this contrived and ill-executed puzzle-platforming game is not greater than the sum of its parts.
Spare Parts presents an interesting anomaly. While the game insists on holding your hand through the most miniscule tasks, it still leaves unintuitive elements throughout the experience totally unexplained. For example, the tutorial walks you ever-so-slowly through the basics of combat and jumping. But once you think it's over, and a Trophy or Achievement pops up telling you as much, it actually isn't. If you leave the room like we did, because it seems like nothing else is going to happen, you miss out on a crucial plot-propelling device -- a new action part for your robot. This is just one very early example from a game that in many ways simply lacks coherence and solid presentation.
Ideally, Spare Parts would be considered a puzzle platformer in the mold of the original Banjo-Kazooie games. You'll traverse different levels to gather parts to repair the friendly, stranded ship you discovered and also gain new action parts to access different areas of the levels in order to solve puzzles. However, as you progress throughout the varying areas, the gameplay in Spare Parts gets more tedious and less enjoyable, which is implicitly un-Banjo-Kazooie. The fixed camera makes platforming difficult, as you can't switch the angle to get a better view of where you're jumping. Fighting enemies gets dull and monotonous after awhile, too.
Don't let this picture fool you -- you can't change the camera angle like this.
It's when you grab another person to play, either locally or via the magic of the Internet, that you'll see how flawed Spare Parts actually is. Cooperative play is anything but. You'll end up fighting with your partner for the stubbornly-fixed camera's attention. And since there's no locking-on to enemies during combat, you'll wind up accidentally punching each other instead of directing your ire at the bad guys unless you disengage the friendly fire option in the menu. Sure, if you get left behind or succumb to too much fire, you can wait to respawn, as the only penalty for dying is losing coins. But respawning isn't always effective. You can be respawned off-screen, hidden behind objects, or, worst of all -- inside a forcefield you can't get out of. It was those very respawn nightmares that evoked a rather strange image in our heads -- a notion that this game wasn't properly tested before being released.
Playing solo is a better technical experience because you don't have to worry about the camera or awful re-spawns, but Spare Parts is supposedly designed for cooperative play. Unfortunately, cooperative play and single-player suffer from too many of the same problems to offer a truly rewarding experience. Only the biggest of "collector" enthusiasts will find any enjoyment from this game, and even that might be a stretch. Our eagerness to be done with the game by the time we were several hours in speaks volumes. Good games are the exact opposite.
