Spare Parts

It's one of those frustrating games that niggles at you in lots of ways, and the cumulative effect is more than the uninspired framework can support. Like the twitchy collision detection that means you can punch right through enemies. Like the slippery platforming that has the potential to make every leap a trial of patience. Like the fact that there's a whole suite of fighting moves, none of which prove essential thanks to the one-note combat.

Or the fact that it's a co-op game with almost no co-operative elements. The only time you'll need another player is to grab some bonus ship parts, vital for getting a 10G Achievement but otherwise pointless. The horrible camera for local multiplayer doesn't help, either.

It's especially disappointing that the game utterly squanders Simon Pegg's voiceover, leaving him high and dry with a bland and largely humourless script. He wrings some fun out of the goofy sci-fi names for the various ship parts, but unless you know it's Pegg at the microphone you probably wouldn't even notice that he was involved.

Indeed, the game as a whole is sorely lacking in personality. The teaser trailer suggests a knockabout romp starring two squabbling slapstick robots. No such hilarity appears in the game. In fact, those aren't even the only robots. You can find and revive loads more, swapping between them for no apparent reason since they all have the same abilities and powers.

And then there's that finale, which takes the mild annoyances that have built up over the game's four-hour-ish playing time and rubs them in your face.

After engaging in a long boss battle against the Diet Darth Vader which involves running around and hitting switches while he shoots at you from a gun tower, you're transplanted back to the start of the temple area. The bad guy now walks around, surrounded by an instant-kill shield. Periodically, his shield vanishes and you can dash in and hit him a few times. He walks slowly and it takes around 17 seconds for his shield to drop again.

On my first try, I spent half an hour following this drab routine to no avail. I'd run in, try and score some hits with my fully upgraded Power Arm bash, the boss would stagger and appear to take damage... and nothing would happen.

Trying again, I used the X-Scanners ability to check that I was, in fact, hitting him with the right thing. Sure enough, the Power Arm icon appeared next to the boss when his shield was down. Except, this time, when I hit him bits of his armour fell off and more enemies spawned.

Yes, it seems that until you use the X-Scanners to confirm that you're actually hitting him, you're not actually hitting him. With that curious loophole closed off, all I had to do was hit him a few more times, beat some more waves of enemies, hit the boss a few more times and then set him on fire. Yay, game over!

Oh, and then I had to go back to the hub and throw some switches. And then go down into the cargo bay to fight the boss a third time. Basically, this game has more endings than The Lord of the Rings, and none of them are fun.

I mention all this not as a spoiler (though it may prove useful to anyone else currently bludgeoning away in that final battle to no avail) but to demonstrate just how clumsy and awkward Spare Parts' construction is. It's not interesting, and it's certainly not challenging – you get infinite lives and the only penalty for death is the loss of some coins that you can only spend on concept art and pointless upgrades. It's a short and rather insipid slog that simply doesn't have the charm or ambition to compensate for its wonkier aspects.

10 years ago, Spare Parts probably would have been a full price game, following in the desperate footsteps of Gex, Croc and other best-forgotten wannabe platform franchises. Progress may mean that it now costs a fraction of the price as a download title in 2011, but the problems at its mechanical heart remain.