Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

I’m going to be honest here, Narsists review isn’t very useful…so anyway I’ll try and give some useful suggestions. I know, lots of text but this may help others on making battle levels too.

Layout: It feels very boxed-in. Seems like you wasted a lot of space…more than you actually needed when you look in lvl preview. Not sure if you know this, but you can right-click, then properties to change the layer size. In this case to change layer 4 size. Try and not start a a box and instead, start making from the left/right corner or middle of the lvl. Draw the map on paper first if it helps. On the other hand, the layout feels quite empty in some places, at least there aren’t really any major deadends, but I could see a lot of improvement. This pretty much applies to the first and third lvl about the rather empty parts.
5/10

Placements: Honestly…I really see no point of those V-poles. You can easily skip over them, and are quite annoying events and should only be used for worthy items or major shortcuts. (I mean like strong PUs, gold coins, Full C’s and such, but even though there isn’t any full C’s in your lvl, just don’t use them in battle). Some of the ammo placements are okay, I see you improved the lvls a little bit by adding some more different types of ammo in previously empty areas, but the ice feels unecessary which is only worth being in levels if there’s pits or access to goodies using them. Pepper might be a better choice to replace them. But some ammo placements do feel a bit random. When placing ammo (I don’t mean the PUs yet) try and think, “If I place those, will it help according to the situation but not be too campy either?”. Lastly, as for PUs errr…I don’t know exactly what to say, though maybe having two powerful PUs would be interesting, or at least just some other kind of other useful powerup, but make sure they don’t overpower the level. The levels seem to really lack in carrots and it seems you were aiming at least one of the levels to be able to recover in, llke only one of them has like one normal C…. you’ve got to be kidding me. And it’s placed a bit too close to the seeker powerup which is one of the most powerful weapons in the game, try and make the C a little bit more difficult to get, and perhaps add another one somewhere else in the level. As for the other two levels about having no C’s, I’ll leave that to decide for yourself if you do want to add any.
4.8/10

Eyecandy: There really isn’t so much you can do with this tileset to make it look really pretty, but at the moment this level really feels like a cave. Take off a lot of those bakground (layer 5) tiles off. Maybe you could make the layer 5 tiles to look a bit more “patterned”….not so sure how to explain exactly. They could do with some foreground eyecandy too.. Layer 4 eyecandy is fine. I also spotted a tilebug at the very right corner of the third battle level.
4.5/10

Gameplay: I have to admit I haven’t really played this map yet after a bit of adding more ammo and stuff.
N/A/10

Music: It’s default castle music, nothing much else to say. Used a lot, but I’ll just leave this bit at N/A.
N/A/10

If you haven’t yet, try and look at some other “serious” battle maps out there other than b1, b2 and b3. Promise me, you’ll find much better examples of battle levels out there.

Should you download this? Meh, not really.