Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

There’s not a lot of level design flow here. You kind of wander around, maybe collecting a bunch of goodies, maybe jumping over some enemies, not sure if you’re going the right direction, and suddenly there’s an exit. But what’s interesting about this pack is how much Talec is (already, in 1999) pushing up against the limits of what the game is supposed to support. Frogs, invisible enemies, secret levels, next level settings. (You’re asked repeatedly to use the JJNXT cheat code in order not to break the secret level bool, though in 2022, we know that using other events could have avoided this issue.) And there’s something thematically fitting about the pack’s focus on secret levels in light of how some of those features are kind of secrets within JJ2. The first level is an edit of psych3, an unfinished secret level, if not the most interesting one. There are more pickups, the warp target doesn’t go where I’d expect it go, but nothing truly remarkable. In general the disappointing factor in this pack is that secret levels are never really treated as a reward. Talec learns from Labrat3 that secret levels are supposed to involve turning into a bird, but there aren’t the profusion of goodies you’d expect from a JJ1 secret level. And you need a secret level to have some kind of desirable experience or else the player is actually working to their advantage to skip it, because they save time that way.