Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Very Good Script and Idea,Nice Work Turbo

Fun Level, Pretty Colours, Very Innovative

I didn't finish this, but based on my experience before I stopped playing this, I can say the following. It's clear that a lot of creativity and ideas went into this level and there are a lot of features that try to break out of the mold of standard JJ2 puzzles and test elements.

But it's presented in a way that makes it exhausting rather than fun for me. Just at the start, there are four long text signs to read with instructions, some of which contain information that is not relevant, such as notes about playing the level in Co-op while I was playing it in single player. Then just a little bit further there are some crates, all with their own instruction sign, and then you dive in the water where more signs await. I don't want to read an instruction manual while playing the game! If you need to explain everything in such detail, that should be a sign that the puzzles or gameplay elements you came up with are not clear enough to the player to understand at a glance or with a little trial and error.

It's a shame because there are some interesting ideas here – a separate gun you need to collect to be able to shoot underwater, needing a shield to pass through an area with enemies, toggling between helicopter ears and double jump – but they are presented in such a way that I do not feel very motivated to try and explore them.

One reason for that may be that the level is not linear – you can kind of run around and try the different challenges at your leisure. That's a nice idea but it also means there is no opportunity to introduce each new feature on its own and e.g. explain it through the level design, by adding a low-stakes obstacle that can only be passed if the player understands that feature. That is how most games introduce things and it works well, but since that is not possible here the player gets a lot dumped on them at once and instead of being able to try things out first you just have to read the instructions and get it right. I did not enjoy this.

As a last note – there are several text signs that are used to explain the difference between hard mode and normal mode or that say "this only applies on hard mode" or something along those lines. You don't even need scripting to make events specific to one game mode – even good old JCS lets you configure a Text event so that it is only present in a specific difficulty. You can use this to not make a player read text that doesn't even apply to the difficulty they're playing – one less thing that can get in the way of them enjoying the level for what it is.

This is essentially a Test level, but made to be played in Single Player rather than online. As someone who never enjoyed online tests that much I appreciate that, and there's less of a sense of urgency when playing just by yourself.

The tests are a mix of standard test fare – jumps, precise sidekicks, etc – and one or two more creative challenges including one where you need to do maths. I don't understand the math clue, which tells me that the formula to figure out what the right gun number is is "[number] x 2 + 1". The number for the first block is 0, so that's 0×2+1=1 i.e. blaster, so far so good. Then the next number is 1, so 1×2+1=3, i.e. freezer? Which doesn't work, so I'm not sure what's supposed to happen here. But overall it's an okay selection of challenges, even if most of it is pretty standard.

Rather than warping back to the start of each challenge, in this level you simply die if you fail, most of the time. Lives are not infinite though, which I found really annoying. Some tests took me a few tries to figure out what I was expected to do and not having the chance to fail more than once or twice seems to only serve to frustrate the player. This was demotivating and I would enjoy the challenges much more if I could take my time trying to figure them out. It also kind of breaks the level once you reach the end of the challenges – you're supposed to shoot a checkpoint and then kill yourself to respawn beyond a wall… but what if you have no lives left at that point?

There's a bit after the challenges where you have to swim through a school of fish. This is pretty easy to do by just speeding through with maybe one or two hits. Then there's a boss, which I found way too hard and no fun at all, but I guess it could be a fun challenge if you're really good at the game. The fact that it takes place in an arena with the same insta-death spikes found in the rest of the level at the bottom feels a little cheap though.

Visually, the level is not terrible, but not that interesting either. I guess using a blocky tileset is more or less a genre requirement, in Test levels – by that standard, this one is one of the nicer-looker ones, with some effort spent on making the background look nice, for example. This level takes place on a world orbiting an oval sun. The argument that it looks right in 16:9 doesn't really work for me – sure, it does, but then everything else looks bad.

Overall, not a bad take on the test genre, but with a bit too many elements that spoil the fun for me to really enjoy playing it.

The level is rather reminiscent of old Test levels, which also forego the usual level design conventions and strip things back to an arrangement of blocks (such as those made with the Top3 tileset), focusing entirely on gameplay over aesthetics. The level looks just about serviceable in terms of functionality, but lacks any kind of visual design flair, mainly consisting of brightly coloured blocks placed haphazardly, like a box of crayolas. There are certainly plenty of far worse looking levels out there, I appreciate that this one lacks many of the more egregious elements found in many similar levels such as flashing colours or obstructive foreground layers. The AI generated clouds look passable but do feel very out of place with the rest of the level, being semi-realistic while everything else uses flat colours.

I didn`t like that I was forced to restart the level after having died once before the water section, that felt like an unfair gotcha! moment. Fortunately it didn`t take long to get back to that section as the level is very short and rather trivial. Most of the challenges I was able to cheese in some way, most simply by doing running jumps as Spaz, such as the Mega Man-esque disappearing block section which I was able to clear in a single running jump (after having died due to not realising the green bar was a pole). I didn`t bother trying to decipher the clue for the destruct block section and just brute force guessed my way through it first time. The water falling section was far too short to be of any real threat. The end boss I just cheesed by jumping to its platform and buttstomping it to death, abusing the i-frames.

Aside from the aforementioned restart, there was nothing else particularly unfair but nothing really grabbed my attention either. If you have been playing JJ2 as long as I have, I`m pretty sure you will have seen just about every obstacle in this level in some shape or form before. I don`t think there`s anything inherently wrong with that, and I can at least applaud this level for not going completely overboard with the difficulty like so many other levels of a similar ilk have done. I feel that the concept of the level, while not exactly novel is an honorable one. It does feel fairly accessible to newcomers unlike other challenge levels which is a nice attribute, although I would still have a hard time recommending it over the vast treasure trove over other similar levels out there that come in a far more polished package and offer a more refined experience. You can certainly do much worse than this, but the bar is set pretty high nowadays.

(My note to the author: please do not feel discouraged by my feedback, I was in your shoes once as well. The best thing is to take feedback as a learning experience, and take it on board for your next project. Making mistakes is a huge part of the learning process for any creative pursuit. Literally every successful JJ2 level creator I can think of started out making mediocre levels but then gradually improved each time with persistence and a willingness to take on board criticism. I do genuinely look forward to seeing your next project!)

Good level imo

I saw a quote recently that stuck with me: "As a designer, I'm a very good developer."

This feels like a level that was developed more than it was designed. It's a series of (unrelated) ideas, fairly novel, executed in a technically correct way. You collect coins but you use a float lizard's copter to get multiple chances to collect those coins. You try different ammo types on some ? blocks. You carefully manage both your food counter and a float lizard. You pay close attention to arrow colors and go through a relatively interesting frog morph puzzle. You, uh, okay, I dunno what's supposed to be going on in the boss battle: you just shoot it and it dies.

Visually it's fine. Nothing about it is particularly attractive, and the thin lines of the forest are kind of hard to pick out against the background, but all the tiles line up together that I noticed and everything's used how it's meant to be used. The visuals are a vehicle for the gameplay—that's totally fine, normal stuff for single player.

Everything seems to work, except, as noted, the sugar rush puzzle, where it's too easy to do things in the wrong order. I'm just not convinced by the argument that it works if you do it properly. If people can do it improperly, unless they're doing it improperly really deliberately, then that's a failing of the design, not of the people. It's fine for a puzzle to include ways to fail, but the trouble is, a failure takes so long to recover from that it's just not enjoyable.

Otherwise, though, yes, everything works. But the thing I keep coming back to is: is it fun? Well… not necessarily. The ideas are a little too bit just the raw ideas without enough concession to gameplay. I do think the frog puzzle is fine, but I don't know why I should care about the (bizarrely long) sequence of following blue arrow signs instead of red arrow signs. There's nothing actually enjoyable about shooting a block with different weapons until it explodes, even if it's technically executed perfectly. What most of these ideas need is to be better integrated into a level with more traditional gameplay… rewards, filler, however you want to describe it. Look at the Fortress of Floods, for example: it starts from a basic idea like you'd find in this level, "go up faster than the water does," but merges that idea with traditional JJ2 gameplay to form an actual game that the player plays, instead of dutifully following the instructions to act out the developer's idea.

This is complicated stuff to describe or implement, and I recognize the danger of subjectivity in ending my review by saying "this isn't fun." But I think there's good work here that just needs some more time to cook.

Well, I've seen worse first levels.

The layout feels largely incidental, very likely made up on the fly as the author was checking out what JCS can do. There's a sense of sections, where one concept is immediately dropped forever as another one comes up. This might be seen as a positive, as it technically keeps things fresh. However, given the nature of these gimmick, it doesn't feel intentional to me in any way, just classic "my first JJ2 level" shenanigans.

First section starts you off having to collect coins to progress, and you have to do this while falling. This is most likely why the level is supposedly "4 Jazz", but I played Lori who also has a copter ears move and even so I found it impossible to collect all of them on the first try (and you do need all of them). So you have to go back, and the method to do this feels counterintuitive, mostly because it's placed near a tree. JJ2 experience says the tree branches are one way platforms, but not this time, and it almost feels like intentional padding.

Here the player is thrown into what feels like JJGBA's shop intermissions, except everything is free. Worth noting is that this establishes that ammo is only provided in this level as part of puzzles and progression. I don't like this in general, as I feel utility is secondary to combat value for JJ2 weapons and should be mostly limited to secrets, but even aside from my personal preference this level does the cardinal sin of not respawning things necessary for progression. Instead, whenever there's a task you can fail, you're provided with suicide spots. Even in vanilla JJ2, there's a quicker and more elegant way to do this via CTF bases, so I'd recommend that next time if you don't want to delve into scripting just yet. Then again, JJ2+ death pits are easy to place even in JCS.

The next section I can only describe as things copied and pasted almost at random, just to fill space and play time. This is probably where jjturbo9 figured out how to copy things. The regular path is supposedly very hard, and well, it's not a cakewalk with all the bees, but you also get plenty of carrots and because these are the same repeating chunks of tiles you know what to do after you've climbed the trees once. As for the other path, I'm confused if the "secret" is a secret at all, given how obvious it is and that the level outright tells you about it twice. I guess not, since it's more or less assumed as necessary for the next section. The highlight here was having to get a Float Lizard to follow the player, and then avoiding smoke rings on the way up. I know I've seen this combination of ideas before, but not a lot.

It's at this point that the level uses the Sugar Rush mechanic as a means of progression. It's a novel idea, but because it's not scripted in any way, it doesn't do its job. Any character other than Jazz can just blast through, and even with Jazz it's entirely possible to tank enough hits to speed to the other side. Out of all the things in the level, this is where Angelscript would most come in handy.

The worst path though is the maze. On the technical side of things, it's actually the most impressive part of the level: generous use of new tiles, a frog puzzle that feels quite advanced for someone's first JJ2 level, and a decent sense of player jump height. However, all of this doesn't help that this is simply a maze through and through, something not very well suited for JJ2. If it was populated more interestingly, perhaps. But right now it's only a bit more palatable than Queen of Board (which sucks and I'm not open to discussion about it). The biggest problem is the concept of wrong turns. Sure, they're clearly marked. But it's still a ridiculous obstacle, with a punishment incommensurable with the kind of mistake you're doing. Furthermore, the Trigger Zones aren't properly placed – it's very easy to end up stuck in one of the appearing blocks, and then the only way out is cheats or level reload. Near the end, you get an option to backtrack. It's fool's gold. Whatever you might've missed, the level has so few items that it's definitely not worth having to go through the entire maze again to get back on track. A shortcut that opens up once the maze has been completed once would be nice.

And finally there's the boss arena. Is this a spoiler? There's no story, so I don't think so. The area is absurdly large considering the boss itself is stuck on a small platform. Well, at least you can't go so far away that the boss would despawn, so points for that I suppose. Miniscule ammo amounts in the level don't matter either, since you get the best powerup in the game just handed to you.

Now, as a final note, I'm not the type of person to complain that "you didn't use the tileset conversion that I'd worked so hard on, weeehhhhhhh" – but the yet another new Diamondus edit included with this level feels extremely superfluous. It's just FawFul's old edit with a few tiles changed, and most of them are really unnecessary. I recommend trying out the custom MLLE level editor, which lets you use vertically flipped tiles with a single key press; you wouldn't have to include every tile you're flipping in the tileset. You can also easily place a player character sprite onto the sprite layer and color it like a multiplayer skin however you'd like, it's just a few script lines! I know it feels impossibly hard at first, but it's really simple once you check out a few existing JJ2+ examples. Also, placing flowers on tree branches is certainly a… choice. Mistletoe, I guess?

jjturbo9, I hope my review and its rating doesn't discourage you from making more JJ2 levels. Rather, my intention is to give you an incentive to strive to be better, to learn more and especially learn from other custom levels. It's a long way to the top (if you wanna rock 'n' roll), but since you already went the extra mile to make your first level bigger and better designed than most first levels that land on J2O, I'm certain you can get even better!

Uhm, you know you can't rate your own levels right? :D

Overall it's a pretty cool level, with some nice sections. Some complaints though, I don't know if it is to troll the player, or just an accident but the first text tells the player to follow the red arrows, otherwise the present is opened too soon. Obviously in this case it isn't an issue since you won't soft lock yourself, you'll just take 1 damage. But later you can get killed by trigger blocks locking you withing spikepits if you aren't sure the text advice was trolling you, or they accidentally wrote the incorrect color as information.

Also in the same area, it would have been nice to give a hint that the crate contains a green spring, since shooting it instantly (and instinctively) will force a restart since you'll have to kill yourself on the spikes since you can't get out of the area any more.

Other complaint. when you get to the "forest" area, the text tells you to go through the rabbit tunnel, said tunnel allegedly contains 96 food pickups. So you need 4 extra for sugar rush. You'll later get to an area, that can only be passed through while having sugar rush. Now the issue is, that you are supposed to get the rest from the forest area, which you skipped through the tunnel. Apparently it is supposed to contain 3 extra food pickups, the 4th one supposedly being right before the area that needs sugar rush. A helpful text is even there to advise you to pick up the 4th food item, after collecting the ones from the forest. You even have destructable blocks that make sure you don't pick up the 4th food item by accident (since you can only reach the area through a Float Lizard copter).
Now for the issue, I actually activated the sugar rush in the forest area, before picking up the 4th food item. So there are either more food items in the tunnel or the forest, or a more annoying issue, that being that dying, doesn't reset your food pickup count. Meaning that when I refused to go through the rabbit tunnel, I reached one of the food items in the forest and picked it up before dying. Therefore breaking the intended sequencing of the level.

Is it partially my fault? Sure, but not going through the tunnel to avoid the forest isn't even a big deal. You go through a bunch of bees, but the respawn timer is actually generous, and you even get a sufficient amount of health pickups. So technically the area is completely passable without avoiding it, especially considering that you have to go there regardless anyway.

So yeah, some sequences can work in an unintended way, which will make the experience a bit worse.

Other than that, it's a decent level, a bit standard apart from some scripting and unique sequences but definitely fun to play.

Edit: just noticed the uploader claiming it isn't the first level from him, I gave the 7.5 with the context of the level being the first creation of the uploader, with that in mind, I'll slightly reduce the score

I'd give it a 10 but sometimes the tiles don't connect perfectly visually. I changed such visual imperfections so many times I'm okay with the few that are still in the level. Maybe I'll fix it later but the level is complete other than that in my opinion. So a 9.6!!!

EDIT01: I edited the visual imperfections and it's a 10 now within the limits of not using angel script. Maybe that's why 9.5 is still a good rating, a turbo 9! ;) I don't miss anything in the level though, so no angel script needed, but I still think it could be cool. I also might have missed a detail, although I think I fixed it all. But just to be safe I don't give my own level a 10.

EDIT02: I also played the level with a controller (more difficult for me) and realized one part would be too difficult for normal difficulty, so I added two save posts. If someone already downloaded and reviewed the old version they got a pm of the change. But I changed it an hour after the initial upload. Now the level is perfect and it's solvable with just using a controller only, from start to finish. I'll leave the rest of the reviews to others, I'm done with it (except playing the level and making/watching a YT video about it probably)

EDIT03 It's really finished now with the 2nd level added. Last time I still improved things after uploading, but this time I had some more experience to make less mistakes. So although 1 fix or 2 might happen, I don't think much is needed. A 9.6 and after I recorded a run-through video for YT and upload it I might have to fix some things, it might get a 9.9 or 10.

EDIT04 On a final note, I'm fine with the overal score right now. AngelScript is also added so it's better although the process of making it was a bit more difficult. That might affect my score a little bit, it's now just an 8.7 imo. The average score shouldn't get lower so I closed the reviews for now. I expected around a 7 although my own rating is higher, but sometimes you get rated lower than you expect and it's fine. I'm already happy it's not lower.