Spare Parts Review

Meet Mar-T and Chip, courageous robots who find themselves stranded on a strange planet, and they must repair an abandoned and damaged spaceship to escape certain doom. With the help of the abandoned ships’ AI, Con-Rad, voiced by Simon Pegg, Mar-T and Chip have to explore various areas on the planet to recover parts for the ship.[nggtags gallery=SpareParts1]

Space Parts is a platform game and it features both local and online co-operative gameplay modes, or you can play through the game all by your lonesome. You won’t even find an AI robot playing with you as it’s not required. Playing with a friend would surely keep you entertained longer for the simple fact that you can talk while playing. A few tag-team moves exist for the co-op players, but nothing too special.  Another downside is the fact that both players share the screen, rather than having their own full screen and this forces you to stay in the immediate vicinity to your partner. The co-op works in a drop-in/drop-out style similar to Gears of War 2 so players can join and leave without interrupting the gameplay. You can traverse through various worlds which are wildly different from one another, but they all feature the same ultimate goal – find parts for the ship.

The platforming feels decent, but there is surely room for improvement. Reaching certain ledges or other areas in general can be tough at times. This can be attributed to the level design, or more commonly the in-game camera which doesn’t always lead you in the right direction. On many occasions I found myself jumping off a ledge to my death because it wasn’t clear on where to go. You’ve got infinite lives which helps, but it almost makes me feel as though the folks at Bright Lights Studios knew people were going to die a lot, and it feels like it’s due to some design flaws.

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Visuals and general presentation are quite nice for the game, and it features some polished looking graphics in most areas, and the animations of the robots are smooth.  Sound effects are very fitting, and the voicework by Simon Pegg is really great. It’s a humorous game to listen to while playing, and you’ll surely get a few laughs from it.

Although Spare Parts has its share of problems it remains to be a fun title to play but it will become repetitive rather quickly, and you’ll be relying on Simon Pegg’s humor to keep you playing. You can try the demo but it won’t even allow you to finish the tutorial so you don’t really get a test of the gameplay, although you can get a brief idea of the combat in the game. If you’ve got 800 spare :MSPoints: , maybe you can grab Spare Parts, but I’d personally wait for the 400 :MSPoints: sale or $4.99 on PlayStation Network.