Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Time for another contest level-review. While looking again to the level carefully although I have had several games there before, the level wouldn’t look that sweet anymore.

Just about the decoration in the background, Sky, “hill-trees”, “tall trees”, they don’t really fill the background enough and it gives a little bland atmosphere. However the fade-color for sky is nice and leaves in front fit. Lightning was used for the cave-region which is alright. I would have wished a little more of waterfalls to the foreground for instance. The ceiling shouldn’t be as linear everywhere either. Also spotted few bugs like at the bottom I could see a very thin line, barely noticable, under the layer 7 decoration. Another thing was at 26,37 which has waterfall-tiles placed both on layer 4 and 5 as double.

Like me, Enigma wasn’t fond of creating a fully symmethrical level for now. It is indeed fine that there are some differences with the sides. However annoying is that the level remains quite linear and that the springs kinda assist you everywhere instead that you would have to do a little jump-work while climbing up to the upper levels. Also I would find the large space between ground and ceiling quite useless unless I was Jazz. Then again being Spaz makes you able to double-jump from tree-tops and such to higher level without springs. Overall the layout makes you very vulnerable to rf-missiles for example and generally it’s just difficult to run away with low health from an opponent here. That’s why this could rather support team-games where there could be always somebody to save the flag if the carrier feels himself chased. It seems to be also possible to cover self with the barrels at bottom, from bouncer attacks especially. The blue base might be possibly a bit easier to camp as well as the hole to the top-level isn’t as close to the base as in red side, not as open either. I earlier had a thought of somewhat this kind of basement for one of my levels. Seems it doesn’t have anything really wrong though I wouldn’t have put the bases technically as close to each other. So the level does give some tactical impressions anyway. The level should actually have only one start-position per team, but looked like there was a “Jazz” start-position forgotten to the top-left weirdly.

While moving through the level, it quite soon becomes clear that most stuff is pretty much placed in a balance on both sides, like carrots. About the j2mc-version, the fast-respawning basic carrots are a freshening choice although a few levels probably had that already. The ammo is placed either separated along a certain path, or in small flocks, that unluckily are, “squares.” The two barrels to the bottom were a nice idea as earlierly mentioned. Anyway all this is done reasonable well, nevertheless anything of it is really SWEET.

Something like 7.5 was my original plan about the level but guess it’s a 7.7 as it took the third place in the actual contest of total 12 entries. The music was originally used in Jazz Unleashed Demo, but is good and suits so that’s something positive too. Overall I feel that I criticized the whole level pretty much but ended up in such an uh…high rating. I just prefer the two older ctf-levels by Enigma over this; The Marshes of Twilight, and Celestial Wargrounds. Download recommendation on all three of these however.