[3] Although generally well received critically, it is the band's worst-selling studio album, having sold one million copies in the United States by 2018.

[3] The album features songs by punk artists such as U.K. Subs, The Damned, New York Dolls, The Stooges, Dead Boys, Misfits, Johnny Thunders, The Professionals, FEAR, as well as T. Rex, Soundgarden and The Skyliners.

"[10] The record has a more scaled-back sound than Use Your Illusion I and II (both 1991); Entertainment Weekly wrote that this was evidence that the group "aims to prove it doesn't need two padded CDs, a horn section and a bevy of backup singers to make a joyful racket".

[11] The lead single, "Ain't It Fun" featured Hanoi Rocks singer Michael Monroe as a guest vocalist.

[9] The album includes a hidden track, a cover of "Look at Your Game, Girl", originally by cult leader Charles Manson.

Label president David Geffen commented: "[If] Rose had realized how offensive people would find this, he would not have ever recorded this song.

Other songs played live by Duff McKagan are "New Rose", "You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory" and "Raw Power".

Guns N' Roses played "Attitude" and - for the first time - "Raw Power" live in Buenos Aires (Argentina) in April 2014 with Duff McKagan on vocals.

[35] Slash contends that the album was "killed" in the US by the controversy surrounding "Look at Your Game, Girl", especially as "everybody in LA and who was 30 or older was in complete upheaval.

[28] Caren Myers of Melody Maker dismissed the band's desire for credibility and their determination to "impress their authentic punky pedigree" on listeners, resulting in a "hideously sincere effort to honour their roots" that instead reveals "how little they understand them".

[38] For Select critic Clark Collis, the group's method of "disinterring...punk classics and subjecting them to the old GN'R treatment" meant recording faithful covers but with extra guitar riffs, resulting in the overall impression of "pub-rockery gone mad".

[32] Roger Morton of NME wrote that the knee-jerk reaction to a "Guns N' Roses-go-punk LP" would be to compare it to "George Michael [going] busking", but conceded that it works on a "primal, inebriated, reptilian brain level" and noted how the choice of covers "zig-zags from the obscure to the predictable to the preposterous", resulting in "a bizarre mixture of swagger, nihilism and bad attitood which is as funny as it is exhilarating".

But in recording half an album’s worth of punk-rock songs, Guns n’ Roses reveal themselves as a glam-rock band, and a good one, as if T. Rex and the Dolls had come out of early punk rather than the other way around.

"[33] Some critics contextualized the material more broadly; Eric Weisbard wrote in Spin that the band's choice of covers demonstrated their belief that "early-'70s metal and its sworn enemy, punk rock, were essentially the same beast, connected through glam and testosterone", and added that while this view was unradical in the wake of grunge, the group's move from metal to punk "took more guts and imagination than Seattle's reverse".

"[40] In his retrospective review for AllMusic, music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine said that, "As punk albums go, "The Spaghetti Incident?"

Johnson believes the album has "stood the test of time rather well" and that its energetic sound showed how the band avoiding becoming "bloated by the sheer enormity of their success".

[41] In The Virgin Encyclopedia of Popular Music (1997), Colin Larkin calls it a "much vaunted collection of covers with a punk foundation" that is nonetheless a "perfunctory affair" mostly notable for the Charles Manson cover and for "lining the pockets of several long-forgotten musicians" like UK Subs, Nazareth, Misfits and Fear.

[42] In The Rough Guide to Rock (1999), Essi Berelian deemed it a "trawl through the band's personal record collections" and an "interesting insight" into their influences, chiefly worth hearing for Rose's "hilarious attempt at an English accent" on "Down on the Farm".

It sold just a million copies in the US – small change next to Appetite For Destruction, but enough to boost both the profile and the bank balance of those who wrote the songs that GN'R had covered on it."

for "[bringing] a load of mostly obscure, mostly punk-rock tracks to a wider audience", and comments hot it was "a curve ball from one of the biggest rock bands on the planet.