Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

These two levels are decent fun. No fancy scripts or custom tilesets, but who needs that when you can rely on some oldschool running and gunning? The level design here is mostly ‘classic’ in style, with the twist of the levels being sort of open and non-linear, involving a good amount of back-tracking. That’s always tricky to do, and it’s easy to make a player feel lost when a level isn’t strictly a dash from the far left to the far right side of the map. Admirably, these levels mostly avoid that, somehow always nudging me in the right direction, though I will admit having to double-check every corner a few times. There are also a couple of bugs that can prevent progress, notably a rock falling in the wrong direction in the first level and a falling spring crate missing the ledge it supposedly was meant to land on in the second.

Apart from these issues, the levels are fun though not especially challenging; while the first level occasionally keeps you on your toes with its enemy placement, by the second level you’ll have stocked up on fast-fires and you can mostly just breeze through the enemies. At the end of the levels waits Bubba, who is never a particularly challenging boss. But despite not being a great challenge, the two levels on offer here are quite fun to play, and they’re worth checking out if only as rare succesful examples of levels that aren’t completely linear.