Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

What is this, Biased City? I refrained from reviewing hoping someone rational would do it first. Guess I was wrong ;P Just to set an example (again) I’ll be reviewing this.

Introduction
For those who have WBRG (Where Bad Rabbits Go) by Skulg will find this set strangely familiar. It’s not just the setting, it’s style. While WBRG takes place in Hell, Colosal seems to take place right above it, at a “gate” mayhaps. Rocky, desolate, with some ruins, the reddish colors really give a hellish atmosphere, which has been done before (like Raging Inferno by Disguise). Colosal is one of the better ones, but does have its faults.

Regular Tiles
What is Colosal like WBRG? The style. The walls and ground are entirely black with red outlines and inlines inside the rocks on the outside. The rocks are actually set in a pattern and each rock fits to the other like a pieces of a puzzle. Geometrically speaking, they’re all pentangles, meaning they each have five corners, and they’re all irrgular. Unfortunately the author went the easy way and used the same pattern for the ground, wall and ceiling tiles: all he needed to do is flip it, and for corners he overlapped. And that had a nasty consequence: the corners can only be placed at one spot in the pattern without creating tile bugs, which hampers the user-friendly a bit.
The rocks are just one part of the set, the ruin part is also there. Pretty generic, it’s nothing more than a collection of bricks. They do come in several sizes and have nice gradients, there are even some for the Layer 4 background (i.e. unmasked tiles).

Background tiles
The Background consists of two things. The first is the obligatory mountain background. They come in three variaties: black with red outline, dark red with regular red outline, and red with an orange outline. As you can guess, the fiery nature grows in intensity the closer the mountains are ;) The peaks are rather smal, but it does like a chain as there’s more than one row in each layer. Speaking of which, you can make it one of two ways:

1) Give each variaty its own layer
2) Include more than one in a single layer

That I really like. The other part of the background is nothing more than a ripped pillar from the Beach tileset. Somehow, I think it fits really nicely with its new orangy colors.
O, almost forgot the textured 3D background. Yes, it’s there, and if I’m not mistaking it’s an adapted version of Medivo’s. Unfortunately the palette isn’t that perfect, in 8-bit it gets… funny where it fades out.

Event Tiles
Here’s where the tileset fails a little. Basically, you only have 4 things to work with:

1. Vine
2. Sucker Tube
3. Destructable Weapon Blocks: Regular, Stomp, Bouncer, RF
4. Invisible Blocks (I’m cluding them here for lack of room)

Nothing else. They’re all original as far as I can tell. My only gripe is that the vine is on a blank tile only.

Eye Candy Tiles
Failing a little again. You’re restricted to the blackness beyond the rocks (kinda catchy). You can fill it stand-alone pentangle rocks or small round one, or maybe even Birdie’s name ;) For the ruins you can add a little pulsing animation, but that’s it.

Mask
Nothing to complain about, everything is smooth to the touch… except for one area: the rocks next to the vine in the set is a bit jagged. Granted it’s a smal dent, so you wouldn’t get stuck, but it’s still a bit sloppy. And it seems hidden mask messages are a standard now.

Shadow Version
I can’t believe I forgot about this one! The same things about the regular version can be applied here, except for the colors of course :p The red and orange have been replaced with shades of purple and violet. A pretty good choice as the cold purple contrasts with the hot red.

Final Verdict
Despite its limitations and faults, it’s a pretty good attempt. The theme hasn’t been done (well) that many times, which is a plus. It’s worth checking out at least.

- JelZe GoldRabbit =:3