Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Lava Fortress is certainly a very good tileset. It is well-drawn and easy to use. However, like anything, it does have certain flaws. This review will try to explore the tileset in more detail than 350 characters and “hope someone uses this” can allow.

How does it look?
The tileset consists of two different themes: a barren, rocky and irreconcilably brown landscape of dust, and a generic factory setting with pipes and conveyor belts.
And lava. Lots of lava.
Both settings are nicely drawn. I think I prefer the look of the factory setting, however, simply because it is much more varied; there are very few eyecandy tiles available for the outdoors — just some wooden poles, bridges, and a dead tree.
And, um, lava.

I must, however, make one exception. The volcanoes in the background look like crap. In fact, they look sort of like actual crap. I admit that volcanoes erupting with actual crap would appeal a lot to my juvenile sense of humor, but it doesn’t excuse bad artwork.

What about usability and flexibility?
It’s certainly easy to use, I’ll give it that. Tile layout is sensible; there are a few tiles placed in rather odd places, but they’re still easy to find.
Flexibility is when the tileset begins to lose some serious points. It’s called “Lava Fortress,” but /you can hardly do anything with the lava/. It is extremely restrictive; lava can only be in one-tile-high pools on a single flat surface. There are tiles for lava pouring into the pools, but no tiles for lava pouring out of them, which means there are no true lavafalls (they’re like waterfalls, BUT WITH LAVA).

And then there’s layer 5. The tileset is impossible to use effectively without layer 5; there are no tiles containing both solid ground and background, requiring you to split them up between layers. I completely understand the tile limit, but come on, I had to give up a layer so that you could draw some fricking crap volcanoes?

Also, the large pipes lack corner tiles, which is rather disappointing (even the example level finds this a problem).

Anything else?
The mask, palette, and event tiles are fine. You can shut up now, Boldface Text.