Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

You can add a bottomless pit by placing a MCE event in the complete bottom right corner of any level.

There’s a lot of interesting experimental design work in this level, but I don’t think CTF is the best gamemode for it. The fundamental rule of any team-based gamemode is that neither team should be given an advantage by the level design, because it’s random who will be on which team. There are occasional exceptions to this rule, like in Assault levels, where one team attacks and the other team defends, but the expectation there is that at some point every player will swap sides. There’s no such expectation in CTF, so you want a very balanced layout. Most levels achieve this by being fully symmetrical across the vertical axis, so the left side of the map is the same as the right side but mirrored, maybe with some slightly different ammo placement but no other significant changes. Levels like this, where one base is on top and the other is on the bottom, are very rare because it’s very hard to do properly. The existence of gravity means that up vs. down is a fundamentally different question than left vs. right.

In this level in particular, the layout is extra unbalanced. The top area has not only the blue base but almost every useful thing in the level: carrots, powerups, even a shield. The bottom area has the red base, spikes, and a (broken) bottomless death pit. Worse, while the blue base area gives you a lot of freedom for where to move around, there is only a single path to the red base, and it’s very long in addition to being very linear. This means it’s much, much easier to hang around the area of the blue base, waiting for your chance to capture the blue flag or deliver the red flag, than it is to hang around the red base. That’s the kind of gameplay CTF levels should try not to deliver without a very good reason.

Anyway. Just moving around in the level is actually pretty cool, even if I don’t think it coalesces into a balanced whole. In other words, I enjoy exploring this map more than I would probably enjoy playing it, and I’d suggest trying to find a more appropriate way to express this same style. The level has a lot of things to do in it, and I’m always a fan of that, provided they’re there in service to a broader gameplay. Secret areas aren’t really in vogue for multiplayer levels anymore, because they they give too much of an advantage to people who’ve played the level before, so I’d suggest dropping the RF powerup/lightning shield area, but in general I do like the willingness to experiment. As for graphics, while this isn’t my favorite Tubelectric palette, everything comes together pretty well and looks good and intricate. Different areas look somewhat different from each other, which is another important thing to be able to do in multiplayer levels, to help players keep track at a glance of where they are in the map.

Basically, on a micro level, this is really good and I’m happy I downloaded it. There are lots of fine details, both visually and technically. What you need to work on is the macro level: how the different areas in the map relate to each other, how players move from one area to another, and why.