Original Levels - Stone Abyss Version

  • Rating: 4.7

Reviews and comments

    ForthRightMC 6 Apr 2026, 19:57

    7Recommended:

    Well, according to me, this version of original JJ2 is very good. New bosses, new tilesets, everything I could ever imagine.

    7/10

    This is a short review. It has less impact on the upload's score.

    ThunderPX 9 Apr 2026, 03:36

    3.5Not recommended:

    This pack kinda crams a bunch of pre-existing AngelScript stuff into the original campaign. I doubt uploading the entire campaign with minor changes is legal, but whatever.

    All levels have new palettes, which are sometimes cool, often take-it-or-leave-it, sometimes just look like they're hue-shifted in an unpleasant way, and one one occasion downright eyesearing (Castle). Levels occasionally do a palette shift partway through, but most of them are indoors so it doesn't make sense. The one I did like is in Marinated Rabbit with the sky turning red before the boss. That's a cool touch.

    Level design is occasionally altered with the addition of previously unused enemies and a bunch of spikes. The Pac-Man ghost appears in Labrat, and its placement combined with its movement would actually add some welcome spice to proceedings, were it not for the fact that it doesn't do contact damage and therefore is basically no threat at all. The Butterfly appears in Jungle and is just kind of obnoxious. Probably the most batshit addition is the randomly appearing Cheshire Cats that fly through walls to shit fire on you (yes, really). These are, to their credit, a genuine challenge, and some tense situations can be created by putting you in a room with them where you don't have much to maneuver. Unfortunately, you're supposed to get out by using the regular hook-tail Cheshire Cats, which are bugged and almost impossible to use properly.

    New bosses taken from elsewhere appear in levels that didn't have one previously. I haven't played the packs these are taken from, so the only one I recognized immediately is the falling Devan boss, which appears twice and has some graphical problems. A number of the new or altered bosses are inserted very awkwardly by doing things like turning the level exit into a warp that appears to take you back to a previous portion of the level, and then expecting you to go to some arbitrary, unintuitive place to trigger the fight. Then they're often followed by making you unintuitively go backwards to actually end the level for some reason.

    Some of the changed bosses are hideously evil, such as Tweedle; he steals your ammo (somehow) and then starts firing smoke rings (which now come with an even more annoying visual effect) leaving you completely helpless. I assume you're meant to nail him with melee attacks instead, but nothing I did seemed to actually make his health go down. Then there's the Witch, who still turns you into a frog and runs off. This resets her health, so if you get hit once, all your effort is wasted. Bilsy is inexplicably only vulnerable to melee attacks; yeah, the boss who was cut from the game for being too hard is now even more of a pain. Good stuff.

    Some come from the Sonic Superstars school of extending game time by being incredibly irritating; the Robot boss now only takes damage when it feels like it, which adds no challenge but just makes it take a very long time to defeat. Bubba returns for an encore in the second Hell level, now as an invulnerable ghost. The objective is to get 10 coins and enter a bonus room to escape, which is actually a pretty neat idea. The thing is, I have no idea what causes the coins to appear; I was shooting and buttstomping but the coins just seemed to appear arbitrarily sometimes. Once you warp, it sends you into a hidden passage above the arena to hit the Level End trigger and… drops you back into the arena, which is very awkward.

    So yeah, this is just a hodgepodge of mostly bad ideas.

    Did you think this was a good review? Yes/No