Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

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.

The Options level is an interesting thought but seems largely pointless, given that JJ2 has built-in character and difficulty selection screens. Otherwise, yeah, it's Uterus. The floor has uneven masking, meaning that sometimes a crab will drop and get stuck in place because crabs don't know how to walk along uneven masking. The background graphics are novel but they're AI-generated, just using a photograph would have been more appealing. I wouldn't point to anything and say it doesn't work (except for the crabs on slopes), but the overall design isn't wowing me either.

Parallax layers are technically present, but poorly configured, with the background texture being the wrong size for the layer. The bigger problem is that you just don't seem to care about picking or placing tiles. Walls have no sides or bottoms. Grass tiles appear on top of other grass tiles. You can look at the official Diamondus levels and see how walls are supposed to be built, and then take a few seconds to find those tiles. Doing it like this, unfortunately, is just ugly. Points for including some trees, a small cave, and some working springs, though.

JJTurbo9, I really like this version of the official final level! The edited music is also OK.

8/10

I kinda like the style. It's like 'this is for fun, I'm not gonna do more effort than I like and screw everyone who won't like it!!!'. And it's playable! But it's very short and I prefer beautiful levels. So I can't rate it as high as these efforts that bring me more joy. I'd give it a 5.7 but a 5.5 is the closest I can give it with this rating system!!! (EDIT: I can give it a 5.7 after all; if I edit my review there's more options! I thought let's share this knowledge here instead of deleting the whole sentence.)

I'm a huge fan of Violet CLM's work, as he(?) is very creative and innovative in level building and JJ2+ scripting. This is another upload that once again shows exactly that. Although Sonic is not a particularly original theme, the execution has been done brilliantly. I really had to get used to the physics, which were much more Sonic-like than JJ2-like. We're not just talking about the gem mechanic (similar to Sonic's ring mechanic), but also about running up walls and through spiral loops. However: once I got the hang of it, this level was great fun to play. The end boss was a nice finish and, once again, very creative. It even has a Sonic-style pinch mode once the boss’s health reaches halfway. As it is not a long level (beatable in just a few minutes), this level is especially recommended if you want to fill the last few minutes while waiting for something that is next on your schedule.

Episode 2: The Firestorm Approaches – it was a very interesting episode you've ever made, sonicnathan1.

I vote 10 / 10

Download Recommended

Also, in my own version, I simply made The Showdown level with only using Devil Devan boss to create the final boss. I simply made the battlefield and that's it.

That was really well done! It's not compatible with Laura, so if you plan on playing as her, be ready to JJMorph for some things. It had a lot of original concepts I have never seen done before. No new music or tile sets but that's ok in my book. If you don't speak Portuguese(like me), you can still understand what is going on if you have played enough JJ2. Like ForthRightMC I use Jazz2+ so I don't know if they are Amnesia Error.

I like that episode. 10/10 hype definitely.

In the ending level, someone forgot to insert the text, in which would be written that after the defeat of Ice Serpent, the cause of the very cold winter has finally put an end, and Christmas was saved once again thanks to the heroism of Jackrabbits.

That was my idea.

Yeah… well… what should I say for this review? Apart from an Uterus boss with tougher shells surrounding him there is not much to do in this level. Quite disappointing to me, since I'm always eager to play new Single Player levels.
There is however one thing I really do like in this level, which is the eyecandy! The background is fantastic and the JJ2+ water reflection works a treat. Perhaps more focus on custom sound effects instead of the stressful background music would finish it off even more.

This reminds me of the Castle tileset used in JJA