Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

A mildly scripted, non-linear SP level where you have to collect keys & gems to unlock doors. You also need to morph into different kinds of animals with unique abilities in order to pass certain areas. This involves some backtracking and memorization of points of interest to revisit, so I’d say it’s indeed a metroidvania albeit in a fairly basic form.

As a rabbit you’ll have the ‘boomerang’ weapon from Jill which is pretty fun to use (in hard mode you have to find a weapon first!). There’s also a spikeball weapon to be found that shoots diagonally and can break rocks. There’s plenty of enemies, some from JJ1 an others are (mostly) reskinned JJ2 enemies that follow their standard JJ2 behavior. And if you hate the (small) bees, then prepare yourself because they’ll be your true nemesis in this level!

Instead of carrots and hearts you have a health bar. Eating 8 apples equals 1 heart, and apples are aplenty so there’s always an opportunity to recover from mistakes. It’s nice to have infinite lives and the animal morph ‘icons’ you touch act as checkpoints too. Hard mode can be challenging but with these additions it still makes a relaxing experience.

All the eyecandy, especially the foreground birds, can be a bit distracting at first. It’s not immediately clear if animals are enemies or part of eyecandy tiles. I suggest looking at Jaws’ old Amazon tileset first before playing this level. :P

I managed to glitch once by escaping the waterfall right from the key gem as a piranha (swim against the upper left tile), but other than that it was a smooth experience. Level recommended!