Spare Time Pineville

Nice place but prices are really high for everything

Love their summer specials where kids under 15 bowl for free

We had our family reunion and we had a Shayla the manager went above and beyond to accommodate us. Customer service at this location left a lasting impression. She has restored the true meaning of what we lost long ago. Great Customer service. We will ne back

Ali was amazing and was on top of everything. We watched her run circles around the rest of the staff. She definitely should be a top manager.

This is a great place with tons to do for the whole family. Bowling and the arcade (just to name a few) are super fun. Everything is kept clean and it's big enough to not have to wait in line for every game/activity you want to do.

Just stopped by for a quick escape room to beat the heat. We had fun!

5*for Shayla. Promotion+holiday weekend+short staffed could have been a disaster, yet Shayla handled long lines out the door and solo. She showed grace and efficiency. Her help came well after 90min. Also wished so many popular games were not out of order. We also suggest to move the tickets checker from the tight corner. At one point, there were three groups waiting to check. Would help have another somewhere or add that capability to the reload machines.

TERRIBLE experience. Don't waste your time or money!

I love escape rooms but this was so horrible I wouldn't even call it that.

Starting off, we didn’t ask any questions and the employee starts telling us how to do the first puzzle. We didn’t want any hints and had to tell her to stop. Then focusing on this puzzle she tells us we’re supposed to start with, it turns out that we wasted over 10 minutes because the door it was supposed to open was already open and we had already used what was inside.

The second door unlocked at some point but we don’t know why or when.

We asked for a hint and the employee tells us to do something we’ve already done. Turned out the drawer/door that was supposed to open on a console hadn’t when we solved the puzzle several minutes earlier. As the employee wasn’t paying attention she never told us. She then continues telling us step by step more hints and had to tell her to stop again.

If everything had worked, we would have been done in 20 minutes maximum.

When we finished the room, the music started blaring, and the employee was saying something we couldn’t hear. We left the room, and the employee ignored us.

We spoke to a facilities manager, who supposedly works on them sometimes, to understand how we solved the room without ever doing the first puzzle the employee told us about, but he didn’t know the rooms. We were telling him about all the things that didn’t open/didn’t work, and he just nodded his head and said they’re short-staffed. We were the only ones doing an escape room, so we were that employee’s only responsibility (in the “command center”) since she had gotten to her shift ten minutes before our game.

They tell us afterwards they modified the room because there were 3 of us, yet the room was supposed to be for 2-6, and they didn’t say anything about making modifications. By modifications, they just remove an entire puzzle because they don’t want someone to be left out if 2 people are working on something when there are 3 people. Of course, we’re not expecting all 3 people to work on each puzzle together, but because of how basic the game is, you can only work on one thing at a time.

He was somehow surprised that we would never want to return to a place where half the puzzles didn’t work and the employee didn’t know what was going on in the room.

I did the Cryosleep Escape Room with two other people. I won’t give anything away but it was undeniably the worst escape room we’ve ever done.

In the most indifferent way possible, the employee gave us what we thought was information important for game play (Nope). Once we began, we were not having much luck. It later turned out the reason for our impasse was because things just didn’t work. I can only assume the person behind the control room pays little attention to the players as we asked for hints that turned out to be things just didn’t open when we solved a checkpoint. Once, when we asked for a hint she asked if we’d already done X, something we had done minutes before. So, we had to catch them up.

For me, the amount of things not functioning and the lackadaisical attention from the staff made it very hard to ever know what to do when you’re stuck. Normally, you’d assume you just haven’t figured out the next step. In this room, you don’t know if it’s you and your fellow players, or just the broken game. We probably wasted at least 20% of our countdown time trying to figure something out when really we just had not been given the new information due to faulty equipment.

We keep going and then suddenly we won the game…without using 75% of the space in the room, not using obvious gameplay areas/buttons. We leave the room more confused than ever. We won? How?

There was nobody present to greet you outside the room, nobody at the pre-game meeting spot. I go to the front desk and try to get someone who can talk to us about the room as to what was puzzle, what was error, and why we didn’t use certain areas.

We stood and looked at two employees who were just standing behind the desk until we hear, “I’ll take care of them.” Feeling special, this person listened to me tell them we wanted to talk to someone about the room. They told us they don’t know much about them but goes over to where the indifferent employee was, came back to us as a middle-man and explained (we think) that the game was modified because we only had 3 people…the game is rated for 2-6 players with no stipulations about how the game gets worse if you don’t have at least 4 players. So, we didn’t do a lot of the puzzle and were not told prior to game start. Even better, the information the indifferent employee gave us when we entered the room was not applicable to our gameplay at all. The door it would unlock was already open for us.

The experience ensured that we will not be back, not take our children, not recommend the place to anyone we like, and the sugar on top was that we gave them a wide open chance to fix it and they looked at us and told us that it’s been a crazy day.

While we do understand how things can go, they offered nothing but that as an excuse and told us we could go ask to speak to the General Manager to see if there was a way to bring us back. I told them that is up to them if they wanted to extend that effort. They did not.

If you like escape rooms, go to one of the venues that does escape rooms only. They generally have a very active part in the game designs, customer satisfaction, and make sure things run smoothly.

Update - I want to call out Shayla from my visit today. She was working a large crowd up front today for VIP day and kept things running smoothly with a smile.

Lots of fun offered including bowling, escape room, lazer tag and a game room. Bar food is a little expensive but it is good and the service staff has always been excellent. It can get loud and crowded so if you can visit earlier in the day Monday-Thursday it is a better experience for little kids or those with sensory issues.

Great place for fun & food! Have your Birthday party here!

Seems like a great place to hang out at all ages. We came for bowling and waited over an hour for the after 9 PM special. It's unlimited after that time, so people are not quick to give up their lanes

Great atmosphere and our food was really good.

Overpriced game machines and very basic food.

Point distributions are low, skill games get stuck a lot, and prizes cost too much for most items in the prize shop. It's only semi-worth playing them on 1/2 off days, but they're still overpriced then, too. Profit margin is set too high. The top prizes are weak, cheap carnival games. Dave and Hustler's has them beat, though.

The bowling lanes are kept up well. The service is meh when ordering food and/or drinks at lanes, the couple times we went. It was necessary to repeat the order multiple times to the service person because she was more interested in paying attention to her coworkers. It shouldn't be this bad. The food is very basic. It's barely a step above high school football game food stands on Friday nights, yet priced like a real, sit-down restaurant. It's not worth your hard earned cash or valuable time.

Spare Time is a fun combination of bowling and Dave N Busters. Little pricey but not ridiculous for the once in a while you’d go. They have parties and good food, as well as a decent bar with games on. Overall recommend, kids will love it.