YMMV / Spin the Wheel

• Padding: Done to such an extent that anyone with a clock will know whether or not the contestant will get to use all four of his or her final spins by the beginning of the round. Then there's the slow reveal of all but one of the offers the contestant's partner didn't take... and then you can bank on the contestant's partner to play it up for the cameras that he or she "went back and forth in [his or her] mind" to make a decision before finally revealing whether or not he or she took an offer.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Ending the game if the contestant loses all their money in the final round, instead of allowing the contestant to at least win some money with the remaining spins and/or with a drastic drop in the final offers from that point. Of the eight episodes aired, four of them ended with the wheel stopping on Back to Zero, and only one of those ended with the partner taking an offer and thus winning any money.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: A general consensus among fans is that the show is pretty much The Wall with a wheel, noting they both have a focus on having contestants with heroic/charitable backstories playing a high-stakes game for "life-changing" money, similar mechanics (especially in the first two rounds, with the first being pretty much an exact copy of the opening "Free Fall" round from The Wall) and question presentation, and an endgame scenario where a partner in isolation can secretly bail out the contestant to avert a potential disaster (itself lifted from the short-lived Set for Life). However, many of these reviews also noted that the "Build Your Wheel" round was a bit more original and interesting than the rest of the show.
  • Both The Wall and Spin the Wheel have been criticized for using gameplay props popularized by other game shows. The Wall was blasted for essentially being Plinko from The Price Is Right turned into its own show, while Spin the Wheel was immediately compared to Wheel of Fortune.