Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

I tried something different with this review. Thus, QUICKEST REVIEW EVER.

GAMEPLAY:

Here’s a nice large level with a little originality. The balance is already taken care of with the semi-symmetrical layout. The flow is Jazz-friendly—maybe too Jazz-friendly—but it’s nothing that would make me feel the need to play as Jazz. The basic idea of the layout is that players use the fountain to be beamed up to the top of the level where they either go left or right to one of the bases. The top area is a little confusing at first, but it’s easy to get used to after a while. If this level was smaller, I wouldn’t like the layout, but it does work out as it is now. In fact, everything else works out, so I’ll just stop here.

EYE CANDY:

This level has the best eye candy with this tileset that I’ve ever seen. While it is rather laggy on my outdated computer (sometimes even with Hardware Acceleration on), and some of the eye candy may be confusing at first (e.g. vine tiles were used without the vine event), I’m not even going to consider marking the rating down for that since so much effort was put into this. The theme and the atmosphere is great, and the light beam in the center of the level is a nice touch.

CARROT AND AMMO PLACEMENT:

I can’t see anything horribly wrong about the carrot placement. There’s a full energy carrot in the center of the level. There are also a +1 carrot hidden on each side, although I would prefer if I could see them. Hidden carrots are okay, though, as long as they aren’t the main carrots (like the full energy carrot is in this level). As for ammo placement, I can’t complain about it. The ammo is distributed well, and it’s the same on each side, which adds to balance. Powerup placement is also good, with the toaster powerup on the left, the RF powerup on the right, and the bouncer powerup on the top middle. Some while ago when I was playing online, the RF powerup tended not to respawn, but hopefully that’s fixed by now. That’s all I have to say.

HOST THIS OFTEN?

A whole bunch of times. Please host this instead of the same old CTF levels and, of course, hotels. I give this an 8.2 so get hosting already.

PS: The tileset used ISN’T beach. Thank you.

The Edit: Now I can see the +1 carrots. Well, it’s not the biggest change, but it’s something. It’s not enough to make me change my rating, though, and I’ll probably use the same exact strategy as before.

Another Edit: This level tends to get a bit too laggy to play in no matter what the settings are. I like it, but the lag can sometimes be unbearable. There are probably too many events in the level. I’m revising my rating to an 8. Sorry about that.[This review has been edited by BlurredD]

Ah, it’s finally uploaded. I spent so much time beta testing it and at the end decided to be very cruel and pointed out bugs which you probably would’nt have noticed were there. Anyways, here goes:

Gameplay: The gameplay here pretty much rux. There is a lot of camping involved (especially at the top of that “Beam me up scotty” light in the center of the level, yes the one that you use to go up). I rarely found myself crashing into things, although I occasionally did. Anyways, its good.

Layout: The level is large, but it’s fairly easy to get to know. It looks symmetrical, and sometimes gets confusing (I sometimes got mixed up where the bases are and which way to the fountain, but that’s probably my fault). Scizor attempted to fix this by making all the flamingoes in that lake face towards the fountain, and by placing the moon glass windows on the blue side and the sun glass windows on the red, and by placing red butterflies on the red side and purple on the blue. But you probably won’t notice these things until someone tells you to look for them, or until you read this review, but still he tried. Other than that, the bases are placed at seperate top corners. To get up, you need to use the fountain placed in the center. It’ll beam you up to the top, and then you’ll go left or right to whichever base you choose to go to. It may sound like the bases are close to each other, but scizor made the doors close behind you as you approach each base, so you can’t grab the flag and quickly go the opposite way to the other one to score. I quite like the layout.

Eyecandy: In my opinion, I loved it. At first, some things looked weird, but after pointing out at least 10 eyecandy bugs (most which are very small and I was just being mean and pointing them out anyways) it looked a lot better. I really love the lighting events here, and it’s my favoritest thing in this level. Plus Scizor used all the layers, thats good. There is a great deal of original eyecandy here as well, and in conclusion I loved it.

Placement of Stuff: At first it was sparce, now there is more ammo. There are 3 powerups placed on floating platforms under the last pits on each side before the bases. Spaz needs to take the fountain up then go either left or right (left=toaster, right=RF) and fall through the pit to get them. Jazz just needs to take the fountain, and before he reaches the one way, swing right or left, and helicopter ear himself and land onto the platforms. Jazz biased? yes. But there are so few levels that are better for jazz these days, that I don’t mind. If you have a problem with this, then I suggest just to use jazz in this level. There is also a bouncer powerup, which is pretty easy to find (located top middle, right after you get thrown up by the fountain). The full energy is right in the middle, and a quick way to access it would also be through the fountain, but there is a chance you’ll miss it, which isnt good. The +1’s are at opposite sides in the suckers. You’d probably not have known this until someone would of told you or until you’d accidentally stumble onto it, since there is no way of telling they are there from looking at the suckers. In my opinion, they should of been more visible.

Overall: I really like this level, not only does it look good but it plays good as well. I had 2 2vs2’s here already and I found this level pretty good to duel in. The only nuisances/bugs are that you can easily get confused, once somehow I didn’t hit the ‘Set Light’ events when I started so the lighting was all gone for me, I’m not sure if this was a glitch in jj2 or in the level. The music also ruxed, except sometimes the tempo screwed up a bit, but then it somehow self-fixed itself.

Final Rating:
Gameplay: 8.2
Layout: 8.5
Eyecandy: 9.2
Placement of stuff: 8.
Overall: 8.7
Final rating = 8.52, rounded to an 8.5. Host this often. **** yeah. Download this? Unless you’d want to miss out on a great roxor level. Great Job, and keep up the good work, sct.

Out of Scizor endlessly nagging me to review this, here I go. Quick review here.

Eyecandy – Very good
The eyecandy took more time than the actually level did. In fact, the gameplay was done about a week or so before the eyecandy was done. All 8 layers are used, and there is fog (which is nicely done). Overall, the eyecandy is great.
Pros: Nicely done fog, all layers are used, great eyecandy.
Cons: Due to the massive amount of layers used, there are no clouds in the foreground.

Layout – Good / Very good
There is nothing wrong here. It’s hard at first, but once you know the level, it’s easy to get to know. For example, it’s hard to memorize that the red base is on the left in this (the blue base is usually on the left simply because most people start building their levels from the left and to the right, and the default CTF base setting is for the blue base). Nextly, the flamingos… in case you are lost and don’t know if the fountain that takes you up to the bases is to the right or left, you just look at the handy flamingos. The flamingos always point to the fountain. Third flamingo to the right, straight on till morning! Neverland!
Pros: Nice layout.
Cons: Hard to learn at first.
Ammo placement – Good / Very good
Even though Scizor probably had a nightmare not being able to put ammo on the steady light events, thus making it impossible to make long straight lines of ammo and/or large rectangles of ammo, he somehow managed to do very well in this category.
Pros: Good ammo placement.
Cons: A lot of it is limited since there were steady light events all over the place that Scizor had to work around.

Overall: Good / Very Good
Host this often: Unfortunately, I enabled my firewall, so I can’t host anymore (I’ll disable it when I’m ready to; I have my reasons for enabling it), but if I could still host, I would host.
Download reccomendation: Indeed.[This review has been edited by labratkid]