Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Hey! Thank you very much for all the reviews given by each of you!

I really appreciate the fact you enjoyed it, as well as all the criticism towards some of the issues! It surely gave me much advice for the future and motivated me to create more!

Love!

This level pack has the potential of becoming the Devres of the Plus era, and that’s not something to be taken lightly. Although there are some minor shenanigans that could be prevented in the next part (assuming there’ll be more) or with an update to this one.

The episode starts with a scrolling intro, where the story is so straightforward that it’s main purpose is to make fun of itself. This is surprisingly followed by a tutorial level that teaches the basics of Jazz’s moveset in a similar fashion to ‘Rabbit in Training’ in the original JJ2 campaign. While this tutorial arguably does a better job explaining the basics than the original, it’s incredibly weird to see it in an episode that quickly gets brutally hard compared to the original levels.

All the levels are carefully designed. Eyecandy is everywhere and its amount and placement always feels natural. Same goes for lighting in caves and the matching color schemes in the backgrounds. The levels are mostly designed around familiar JJ2 gameplay although there are some exceptions such as the floating rock ride in ‘River Ride or River Die’ and swimming with limited oxygen in ‘Swim For It!’.

Food and gems, while not serving any purpose due to the removal of Sugar Rush, are everywhere and fun to collect. Exploration is often rewarded with coins, which do serve a purpose as the coin warp near the end of each level is the only means of getting 1-ups! Carrots can be found often but not always on the straight path, sometimes a risky jump is necessary to get one. Ammo is relatively scarce but the levels are designed around its usage pretty well, just make sure to conserve it for those occasions.

Enemies are mostly placed where they form a fair challenge instead of just being cannon fodder. Except for the bats in the latter half of the pack, they’re often hard to notice and feel like a cheap trick that JCSers try to avoid nowadays. Oh, the ghosts in the temple section of ‘Swim For It!’ can be annoying as well, they’re invincible and eager to attack, unlike what a hint message near them says. What is lovable however, are the intuitive test-like Airboard sections spread across the levels.

Overall it’s a pack clearly aimed at the experienced JJ2 player. I highly recommend it if you believe you fall into that category. I played on Hard and enjoyed the extra health enemies had. Button mashing JJ1-style is so satisfying! The many things I enjoyed here really made up for the few frustrating design elements, and I’m a sucker for cheap humor so..

This is a strange level pack. For one, it starts with a wordy tutorial for basic Jazz Jackrabbit 2 mechanics that speaks to the player like they’re a baby who’s never played not only JJ2, but any video game, providing insight such as, and I quote, “to shoot press SHOOT button.” This approach of placing signs with lengthy messages explaining standard mechanics continues far into the level pack, telling you, among other things, how every new standard weapon you collect works. It’s somewhat baffling; aside from a snarky remark very early on, it’s played too straight and goes on for too long for me to perceive it as ironic, and this information appears useless not only to anyone familiar enough with JJ2 to venture into user-generated content, but also, honestly, to people who have never played the game before. “Show, don’t tell” became good standard practice in teaching game mechanics over a decade ago; JJ2 itself does it, in a sense – it never tells you how a weapon you’ve just collected works, you fire it and find out! I want to give the author the benefit of the doubt and trust that this is just a weird aesthetic choice, but it does have the unfortunate side effect of wasting players’ time. It also has a side effect of making me cringe whenever attempts at comedy show up in the messages – the sense of humor in the pack is one that used to be really popular in media maybe 20 years ago, exhausted its potential back then, and nowadays sounds dated, unoriginal, and somewhat infantile to me.

What’s odd is how much this tutorialization of game basics stands in stark contrast with the actual difficulty of the pack. You should most likely not pick this up if you’re actually new to the game. I didn’t struggle with it personally but I can recognize that this is a fairly hard campaign. An unexpected difficulty spike occurs right in the middle of the pack, in River Ride or River Die, which is the only level that made me river-die, and a couple times at that – it appears that the level designer recognized this too, as it’s the only level that provides you with a free extra life right at the start, as if to say “this is the part where you die a lot.” Most deaths in the pack will probably be delivered to players by instant death pits, which is pretty much par for the course in packs that contain them. For credit where credit is due, I thought the pits were marked exceptionally well, with some sort of sign indicating danger almost every time they would show up. That said, despite being a feature that doesn’t make an appearance in the main JJ2 campaign, somehow they’re one of the few things the tutorial messages won’t actually tell you about, go figure (aside from offhandedly mentioning “the deep chasms” while discussing buttstomps).

Something else the tutorial messages say is to collect everything you can, for a simple reason: points. I think that’s the crux of one of the major issues with the pack. While the levels aim to encourage exploration by being full of optional paths and secrets, in practice there is little of value anywhere. The main pickups used throughout the campaign are gems, food, coins, and sometimes ammo and carrots. Gems are not given any new purpose via scripting, and the sole purpose of food – the sugar rush – is actually intentionally stripped away. Collecting enough coins allows you to access a bonus warp at the end of each level, which grants you access to… more gems and food, generally, plus usually one extra life. As far as I can tell, only one weapon power-up shows up throughout all these levels, and it’s on the main path where you can’t miss it, so that the pack can stick a tutorial sign next to it. JJ2 has so many ways to reward exploration – power-ups, shields, bird cages, invincibility carrots, even ammo that’s otherwise rare – and maybe I just somehow threaded the needle and missed all that good stuff, but I have not seen a single one of those things. It is 2022; “points” will not do. Watching a number go up is only exciting if that number serves a purpose. Additionally, I counted about 3 invisible, unmarked points of no return created with the Limit X Scroll event, that, if you unknowingly trigger them, may cause you to permanently miss pickups on optional paths, for no obvious reason, further hurting the exploration aspect of the gameplay. On the bright side, carrots, while not exciting, made the exploration somewhat worth it on occasions, and I applaud the choice of coin warp prices, which are just lenient enough that you should never miss them if you dedicate time to exploring, even if you fail to find some of the coins.

Now that my main gripes with this upload are covered, on to some of the positives; the levels are gorgeous. All of them are consistently beautiful. At times this is done to a fault – sprites can easily become hard to see in some locations, but it’s not a prevalent flaw. They are also very consistent in the selection of JJ2 features they use – if something shows up, it will show up again, no weird one-offs. Yet the pack doesn’t quite get boring and tries to mix and match different mechanics, present them in different contexts, and every once in a while break up traditional platforming segments with an airboard section. I can appreciate that. Most levels are fairly traditional, but several have a prevalent and more noticeable theme in their mechanics, especially the aforementioned River Ride or River Die. Aside from occasional rolling rocks thrown at you without warning at ridiculous speeds, and the rather mundane rock pushing sections, the challenges are quite fair and enjoyable. Collapsing scenery is used often enough that you know to expect it, and it’s quite consistently used on the same set of tiles. Usually masking is also what you would expect – there are some exceptions to that, but nothing too bad. Some of the early levels have slopes that make you run down them, and those are a weird choice that probably could’ve been cut. I never quite got used to what looks like normal JJ2 slopes making me suddenly accelerate, and they’re never used for anything interesting.

Lastly, as a note that didn’t fit elsewhere, at least one midway level where you can save your game would be a massive quality-of-life improvement. This is a fairly lengthy pack and making players finish it all in one sitting is asking a lot.

Overall, this was a bit of a mixed bag. The part of me that enjoys platforming and combat was reasonably satisfied, and the explorer in me was disappointed. As a veteran player I found the difficulty to be adequate, but was constantly confounded by the presence of tutorial messages treating me like I’m using the computer for the first time. I’m giving this pack an 8 because the things it does well, it does very well, and it’s worth playing through. Even experienced JJ2 level designers can learn a lot from this. Just try to only learn the good things.

A pretty good level pack, a bit too difficult and dickish for my liking. The level design visually is awesome, with equally fitting music. It’s pretty obvious that the level designer worked a ton on the aesthetics and the item/enemy placement also looks like every single placement was thoroughly thought out, so basically every dick move in the levels are completely intentional (bats in front of death pits, checkpoints after difficult platforming areas rather than before, no saving allowed, death pits that aren’t obviously death pits due to the game resolution, copter lizards in very awkward spiked areas etc)

Though I’m not the target audience for this level pack, I can’t look past all the things that I loved about it. The humor in the text messages are funny, and an enjoyable read. The levels look pretty as hell. The level design/layout itself is well thought out apart from the deathpits. The choice of music is great and fitting.

Despite the difficulty not being my cup of tea, I’m pretty confident in recommending this since all this work deserves to be seen.

 “Jazz Jackrabbit 2,5 – The Big Rescue” is one of the best JJ2 single player level packs to come out in a while. With 7 lengthy levels and one boss level, it manages to implement lots of gameplay mechanics and set the story and tone for the future parts to come. Instead of covering each individual level in this review, here’s an overview of my thoughts on this pack.

 Pros:

• The visuals range from pleasant to gorgeous. The level creator clearly knows how to make a level look pretty.
• Good introductory level. It’s simple enough for someone new to the game to understand the game mechanics, yet still fun for more experienced players.
• Fitting music choices for each level.
• Little to no tile bugs.
• Diverse gameplay mechanics that don’t overstay their welcome.
• Sign text is both witty and informative.

 Cons:

• Instant death pits. They can be tolerable, but not in this level pack. 1-UPs are scarce and the pack is already pretty challenging as is. One slip of the finger and you might end up having to replay the entirety of a lengthy level.
• The gameplay can be a bit unfair at times, with unexpected collapsing scenery and obstacles that are too difficult to avoid.
• There’s no way to save your game. You’ll have to finish the entire episode in one sitting.
• Invincible ghost enemies in a claustrophobic area of the game. Ugh…
• The text has some typos here and there. The most obvious one would be “2,5” instead of “2.5”. This is just a trivial nitpick though.

 Other observations:

• The README file says that this pack was made with 640×480 screen resolution in mind. I played it in 800×600 and I believe this resolution works just as well as the intended one.
• Sugar Rush and Fast Fire events were removed from these levels. I think this was a change for the better, but different people might disagree with me.
• This is a challenging level pack and you will most likely die a bunch of times. I recommend playing it on Easy difficulty if you’re not very confident in your skills.

 TL;DR: This is a charming single player level pack with long, challenging levels and good eyecandy. It can be overbearing at times but I enjoyed the overall experience regardless. Give it a go!

The maps are really big and hard but with a lot of eyecandy, very fun to play, I can’t wait for part 2 :D