Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Dingle Dell? Sounds kind of Christmas-like, right? Even though the music somewhat carries that theme, this level actually fits perfectly with the current time of year. No, seriously: Violet, what an amazing piece of art you've created!

Yes, everyone: our amazing level builder once again delivers something truly magnificent for all of us JJ2 fans to enjoy. The layout of this level is quite simple, which works really well for me, since I tend to get lost easily. It's basically a matter of going down, after which you're launched back up and start over again. Along the way, there are tons of goodies for you to collect. It might sound a bit boring the way I describe it, and I think more experienced players might find this level slightly less engaging.

That said, there's still plenty to admire in the colorful eye candy this level offers. The vibrant background and the falling blossoms give the level a very cheerful feel. Also, I'm really impressed by your introduction of those colored springs, which launch you all the way back up the stage. It was incredibly satisfying to use them!

All in all, I'm giving this level a well-deserved rating of 9. Amazing work, Violet!

I'm not sure how this one does it (the colors probably), but it's just so lovely and relaxing to hang around in. Plays well too.

Uploading these in 2013, after years and years of memories from past Bashes and JDC events, was almost nostalgia bait. 13 years later they continue to hold up, even if some of the design choices are a bit questionable.

Was a surprise to see this for the first time in the 2020's, knowing how some things here were quite far ahead of their time.

I like this, but some more visual consistency would be an improvement.

Doomsday Darkdream is still a classic, despite the years, and a 7 is appropiate. The others are kinda whatever.

Visually one of the very finest, with some interesting surprises deep below. The layout, while not the most sophisticated, will still allow for a good match, or two, or more.

The music is VERY LOUD, and some things could may be better, but it's a decent level.

Pleasant and enjoyable, even if maybe a little too gray.

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.

Two quotes sprang relentlessly to mind while playing XX2: Colossal Cave Adventure's "YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL DIFFERENT," and horse_ebooks' "Everything happens so much."

Because these levels are twisting. And they are constantly changing. And they are relentless.

I really can't find any better way to characterize these levels. There are occasional individual moments that take up a lot of space and are separately memorable… the trigger scenery sequence on the far right of Space. The repeating circumflex platforms in Oasis. The Pirate's Walk block puzzles in Islands. The central warp hunt in Aztec. Uh, nothing in Twilight Park, sorry, you're good but you don't have a set piece like the others.

Mostly, though, gameplay consists of an endless procession of enemies, of ammo, of food, of carrots, mostly in twisty little passages. Nearly every enemy JJ2 has to offer appears somewhere across these five levels, and most of them manage to be threatening, but not too threatening, because you always have useful weapons to fight back with and there are enough carrots you're never in serious danger. (Especially important in Aztec, where by the nature of trigger scenery, you need to be able to survive very long times between checkpoints.) There aren't shields, there aren't coin warps, there aren't powerups or invincibility carrots or other rare stuff, there are barely gems or birds, there's just you and constant battle and constant pickup collection in all directions. Ammo and enemy placement hits that beautiful sweet spot where you are constantly collecting ammo but never too much (except maybe electroblaster), you're constantly incentivized to actually use it, to defend yourself more effectively and artistically than basic blaster could get you.

The levels are absolutely full of unnecessary, but welcome, detail. Hardly a wall does not contain some secret or some unique snippet of eyecandy that's just there to show off. There's unique room after unique room, even in tilesets we're all familiar with by now. Flat lines barely appear, instead your path is constantly spiraling around itself. Occasional gameplay objects like sucker tubes, collapsing floor, spike platforms, and pinball flippers are used to great effect but never take up too much space, they're just part of the levels same as anything else.

This feels like a redefinition, a reclamation, of JJ2… not repeating the old, not trying to be something radically new, but a distillation of the core gameplay that is, impossibly, both incredibly concentrated and yet also incredibly drawn out. No filler, only hit after hit.

Still, it's not a 10, I didn't like everything. Some of the regenerating enemies are fine, (and are often useful for buttstomping) but I particularly chafed at the skeletons in Twilight Park. The horizontal spring rooms don't do much for me. There's repeated confusion about what the block tiles mean: sometimes a block will be destruct scenery, and sometimes the same tile will be buttstomp scenery. The Aztec level features lock (=trigger) blocks as TNT scenery and ? blocks as trigger scenery. And for all that the Aztec level is hugely, enormously ambitious, it does try to do two specific things at once, and either would be okay but the combination isn't. Almost the entirety of the pack is linear, following a single (very curvy, elaborate) path, but Aztec sends you on repeated trigger crate hunts, and it's far from clear what they do. At the same time, it makes very heavy use of (pretty!) foreground layers that make it difficult to tell which directions you can move in or what areas are solid. Together these make it just too hard to know how to progress, and I genuinely couldn't find my way out of the Treetop area after hitting the trigger crate. Maybe I had done a sequence break earlier and messed things up for myself? I really don't know. (The foreground gets in the way in some other places too, especially Space, but Aztec is the biggest offender.)

But I can forgive that, because for the most part, there is so much being thrown at the player at every second in every level and so much of it is good, complex far beyond what anyone could reasonably expect. I imagine making these levels must been meditative, like embroidery, constantly layering new details into every square foot until there was no room left to add anything more.

x_xx.j2l is missing?

Visually, the first level doesn't do itself many favors… it spends a lot of time in flat corridors, filling the screen with two different shades of brown and no chance for the parallax layers to shine through. Rarely do you have more than four tiles, horizontally or vertically, to move around in. The gameplay is tightly controlled that way, but so are you, you just don't get to play around very much. Things open up a bit toward the end, but the overall impression is cramped, and the level isn't very long if you're not collecting all the secrets.

On the other hand, there are a whole lot of secrets (sometimes so many it's not clear what the real path forwards actually is), and that's always fun. I think I found a lot of secrets, but then I look at the level map and realize how many I missed. Trigger crates do cute things, there's good work with springs, and ammo is placed somewhat frugally in a way that makes you appreciate its utility and not just see numbers go up with no chance of ever using all those bouncer bullets. For all that this level isn't the prettiest, the events are good and there's stuff to do and explore.

The second level starts off much better, with a big open area and a lot of vine events. The background walls aren't just bordered with straight lines, looking more like the official levels and showing off more of the parallax layers. The level does dip back into the cramped brown corridors from time to time, but on the whole it's much more visually diverse than the first one, and there are cool set pieces and other memorable gameplay moments. There are definitely a lot of warp events in the back half, but they help to define different gameplay sequences, like okay, now you'll do this thing for a while, then there's a warp, then you'll do some other thing. A dedicated area for letting the headbutt bird kill the inconveniently placed dragons feels really satisfying. There are probably fewer secrets compared to the first level, but they're bigger. More weapon and more enemy types. Just a great time, well executed.

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

7/10

Like the description says, these were made in a similar style to the original levels. I really like these type of maps. They are simple, to the point, and fun.
I'd say these 2 levels feel a bit more twisty and windy, but that is more of a positive, since it encourages you to explore the levels.
The first level mostly relies on trigger scenery to block and open passages. It has quite a few secrets which were fun to look for, since most of them were well telegraphed. The levels are mostly on the easier side, with some occasional tricky enemy placement. The levels also look pretty cool thanks to the layout with no real tile glitches, or if there are, they weren't noticeable enough for me to find. The rope section in the 2nd level is the only one that looked slightly off. One criticism I have with the first level, though, is that the coin warp is placed right at the end of the level, though since this is a 2 level pack, and this only happens in level 1, it is less of an issue, than it would normally be.

The second level is a bit more warp heavy, with a bunch of the secrets also relying on them. Some of the warp points felt a bit random, where I found them by complete accident. Some of the secrets require bouncer or 2-way rocket ammo to access, one even has speedblocks. These luckily are always in areas where you can tell there is a map section on the other side of the wall. Like I said, the non warp related secrets are well telegraphed. Also, towards the last third of the level, the open door background textures represent warp points, which can teleport you away prematurely if you don't know about them and accidentally run into them before looking around properly. It happened to me. No boss at the end of the map pack, but I didn't really expect one. Pickups are relatively frequent, but you won't feel overloaded with them, maybe they slightly lack variety, none of the rarely used stuff shows up, like shields, invincibility or fly carrots, though there are some fast fire pickups hidden in secrets, which is nice. But overall there is enough to motivate you to look around the map and collect everything.

Now I'll fully admit, that I have a positive bias towards these type of levels, which try to scratch that nostalgia itch. So while these 2 levels don't reinvent the wheel or try anything outlandish or unique, they were not intended to do so. What they promised were levels with the style of the original game, and in that they succeed. The levels are well designed, competently created and executed perfectly for the goals that were set out for them.

So yeah, my score might seem too generous, but I'd say for anyone that loves the original levels, they will feel right at home with these 2. And I think even the people who do like more spice added to their maps can appreciate this upload for how well designed it is.

I disabled ratings but feel free to share your opinion if you like.

Amazing level, hot, with lots of dangers. And that deserves a perfect rating.

10/10 hype

8.5/10

When I played this level multiple times, I liked the atmosphere of it. Good work

I liked how each level in this pack set a different objective to be completed. The levels all look pretty simplistic with little eyecandy and no complicated pathfinding. The 2nd level (Tubelectric) stood out to me the most, with a barrage of sentry bullet thingies coming from all ways on Hard difficulty. The boss was an interesting gimmick, albeit a bit easy. Overall I recommend this pack as a little diversion from your usual JJ2 SP custom level.

I don't get these negative reviews… It's just a simple boss arena with a nice background, what you see is what you get. No one forces you to download it… And the options menu level hás a point; you don't have to go out of the level to select another character or difficulty. Imagine you beat it and you wanna beat it again but with another character, or you found it too hard and wanna adjust the difficulty.. You can do so without having to go out of the level. And about the crabs getting stuck in the mask, so what? The level isn't less fun because of it and I think it looks funny when one goes left and right at the same time, like another kind of crab… But most of the time they don't get stuck anyways, just a few per battle. And BlijBlijBlij, why would you blame me for not having a single player level for you? Just enjoy the level for what it is; a boss arena! If I wouldn't have uploaded this, would you have your single player level then? No, so I don't think you should base your rating on this. But thanks for some of the compliments.. And I give this level a 5.9.