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.

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.

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.

I have two pithy thoughts here: the last modified dates for most of these files (mostly 2015-2019) are sad to look at, and it's an interesting pack that mostly reviews itself. The detailed readme gives sonicnathan's thoughts on all these levels individually, written years after they were made, in enough detail that I don't really think I need to do the same. I'll give some general thoughts but I'm not going to touch on every level one at a time, other reviewers may definitely want to though, there's a lot of variation here.

The earlier non-story levels, with the Colon tileset, do some interesting things with frogs and queens and so on, but they're mostly linear left-to-right single player experiences. They have a lot of block tiles, often the wrong ones, because Colon (like most official tilesets) doesn't have dedicated tiles for trigger scenery, and no one in 2015 would seriously entertain the idea of a ColonButWithTriggerScenery.j2t. That's an early way the episode shows its age, technologically speaking. Later there's a warning telling players not to save in a level because it's too big, which is no longer an issue, and the Bees event is used for wall/ceiling spikes, and stuff like that. It's all perfectly playable but one does occasionally remember that some problems have been solved in the last 5-10 years. The readme calls some of this out too, including a couple sequences where you need to shoot empty air to make small platforms appear, which gets you stuck if you happened to be inside the platform at the time.

The shooting-empty-air sequences are a great segue into one of this episode's main design principles, what I tend to think of as "mind reading" design, in that you have to be able to read sonicnathan's mind—or, realistically, just shoot and stomp every surface—in order to progress sometimes. There are a lot of things that would count as obscure secrets in other contexts but here are mandatory. What bothers me about these areas is how large they are, you're not just checking each wall in a room, you're wandering the entire level (that you've unlocked so far). One particular example: in the Ship Wreck, there's a one-tile-wide invisible hole in the ceiling. Initially it's walled off by a trigger scenery tile (which looks like a speed block), so if you see that and take note of it and remember which part of the ceiling it was at, you're good! Otherwise you're in trouble. Sometimes help strings or arrow signs will clue you in when you need to stomp a bit of floor, sometimes they won't. There are several more-or-less blind mazes scattered through the pack as well.

A random thought: for all that this is a single player episode, these elements remind me of something like Cracco World of Coins, or the UR Orbs levels. There, some of the progression is equally arcane, but because many players are exploring the same area at once, they can use chat to share discoveries and get everyone to the finish faster. Here you're more on their own. Also, because checkpoints don't do a good job of saving trigger scenery states, often the pack will make you spend many minutes in a row tracking down secret after secret, all the while dodging enemies and spikes, knowing that death will reset all your progress.

That's the negative. Even when the levels do give you hints, like saying a 'lower door' has opened, the hints are often hard to follow. As the pack progresses, linearity gives way to opaque confusion, the platformer equivalent of pixel hunting in adventure games. It's a distinct level design style for sure, it's clearly very intentional, it's part of the grand tradition of taking JJ2 levels in different directions than the official levels intended… it just kind of wears on me personally. I think without the checkpoint problem, and with slightly smaller areas to explore, I'd be fine, I'd regain the thrill of discovery and exploration, but there's just a little bit too much stacked against it right now, especially in the Top Secret level.

The positive is that there is still cool stuff in here! I'm naturally biased, but the Crysilis level is really pretty! There are so many different eyecandy elements thrown all over the level, and yet it rarely feels unapproachable. Yes, it can be hard to keep track of where you need to go next, but there's inventive design and cool platforming sequences! The background is surprisingly detailed for Crysilis too, and the number of enemies seem generally well matched to the ammo.

The readme mentions inspiration from EvilMike's episodes, and this is particularly obvious in the intro/outro text, but also in the use of specific weapons to gate progress, like descending through the level to find a single toaster pickup to blast through some toaster blocks. This is still rare enough to feel cool, I think! It does have the issue where you'll get only 3 or 6 rounds of a weapon, and need to spend every single one of them on the blocks, and definitely not slip up and kill an enemy instead—but in general the ammo and the blocks are close enough together that people probably won't make mistakes.

The readme isn't kind to the Chemical Labs level toward the end, which is mostly storytelling instead of gameplay, but I like it… it's a good example of level design as storytelling, working together with the more traditional text strings. (Levels in general are laid out differently from each other, befitting their tilesets and their story roles.) And then there's a kinda cutscene level afterwards that feels like an Another Story throwback.

For all that the more opaque puzzle solving didn't fully land for me, again, there's other good experimentation going on, like the queens early on. It's that skill of looking at what an event does and thinking about how it could be used, which can be different from how it was supposed to be used. The boss battles do a lot of this too, using flailerangs as added sources of danger, like the monks from Time Tripping. And there's a lot more pepper spray here than in most custom levels, acknowledging that it can be used as a sort of blaster powerup with finite ammo, good against tuf turtles (but also dragonflies).

I don't have much to comment on about the story, though it's neat that the readme goes into detail about what episodes 3 and 4 might have covered. Some of the asides are neat, like the hologram sequence. In general, Jazz is being a hero and Devan is being evil and has lots of evil plans and resources. It suffers from the same problem as a lot of similarly-plotted episodes in that Devan himself is mostly absent, you just get a disembodied voice from time to time, threatening evil against you.

Overall, this is definitely an episode with highs and lows, and I'm having trouble condensing all that into a rating, a number. It's a custom episode in the grand history of many custom episodes, a struggle between good and evil, a classic that we almost never got to see. It's a tour through complex layouts in varied locales, with puzzles to solve and enemies to kill (though that's rarely the focus). It runs a full gamut between basic linear design and whatever the opposite of that is, and therefore, no matter what your favorite point on that scale is, at some point in this pack you're going to encounter areas that are NOT that.

This is more of a Mario level than a Jazz level, it's very basic platforming that's not well suited to how far and fast Jazz can move. Also falling into the pit doesn't actually kill you or anything, you just softlock. You are using more than two layers, though, so that's a plus.

I'm not the best person to review this, because I'm not familiar with Monica Gang or Brazilian Comics in general. This reminds me of https://www.jazz2online.com/downloads/1678/land-of-blode/ more than anything, but that had level design and tiles that were drawn to be used in levels. This really doesn't. The clipart is oddly small, but more importantly, the level art just doesn't line up with the 32×32 pixel tile grid at all. The level is a bad use of the tileset, but I don't think it's possible to make a _good use of the tileset. The author needs to find a drawing program that supports 32×32 grids, and then get some practice drawing tiles that fit in that grid and can repeat as tiles.

I like the reverse layout approach, but this is lazily executed. In particular, arrow signs still point in the old directions, there are unnecessary springs, star blocks are used as trigger scenery, and there are two trigger crates in the same area for some reason. More problematically, the witch activates and reactivates at the wrong times, the health bar flickering in and out of view for no clear reason.

Your screenshots show that the level uses a custom weapon, but you don't include the script file to make that work. If you're using MLLE, try the "Tools -> Package in ZIP file" dropdown menu option: that will give you all the right files so that other people can play your level.

That said, we can basically play the level, since there's not enough here for the secondary weapon to really matter. The initial section is a bit interesting because you have to jump onto the sides of the pillars, then from the sides onto the tops, dodging (or stomping) the skeletons. But everything is buggy. Destruct scenery doesn't really work (https://www.ninjadodo.net/htjcs/ht/anim.html), hooks don't have the Hook event, the sky doesn't tile correctly because you didn't resize the background layer. It's good that you have different challenges, that part of the layout is interesting, but the basic technical details aren't here. Read some tutorials, study some other levels that do the things you want to know how to do, find a friend who can verify that you actually included the right files to play your level.

Your screenshots show that the level uses custom weapons, but you don't include any of the script files to make that work. If you're using MLLE, try the "Tools -> Package in ZIP file" dropdown menu option: that will give you all the right files so that other people can play your level.

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.

The Halloween Contest rules noted that "Scripted gameplay modifications are permitted [w]ithin reason. Please submit a Battle level, rather than an example level for your new cool gamemode mutator." I have lingering doubts about whether Astral Witchcraft really obeys this rule, but fortunately I'm not judging the Halloween Contest, I'm just reviewing a battle level. Or a CTF level. Or both.

There's a lot of room in this world for battle levels with deeply strategic layouts, hidey little corners where you need to use the exact right weapon to hit people, powerups and other resources you need to dominate control of to win. This isn't any of those things. This gives you lots of power right from the onset, and while there are definitely extra ammo types you can find to make you stronger, you can still get by without them. You're always a killing machine. There are always likely to be enemies in front of you, no matter what the minimap says. But the weapons are cool and new, so this feels exciting. In retrospect, this is kind of what I was condemning Titan Armory for…?

Visually I don't have much to say other than it looks incredible. There's rotating stuff! Tendrils of greenery! Colors that pulse with the music! Whatever is going on in the background! Eva out for a night on the town!

The buttstomp blast takes a little longer to charge than I'd like, and the center area for getting the green ammo is oddly hard to reach. That's all I've really got.

Necropolis is a perfectly fine level that doesn't have an obvious major appeal, and so suffers a bit in a landscape of levels that show off a bit more. Yes, there are neat touches here… I like the named areas, the Tomb Rabbit mummies, the cool way that the background clouds avoid the moon. None of them are necessary but it's neat that they were done anyway. The enemies in the background have been done several times before but they're still executed just fine, especially getting to see the black raven flying in front of the moon. The layout is actually quite distinct, though I think it's too flat at the bottom. The big open top is good for copter ears, although some fastfire pickups wouldn't go amiss. The weapon choices are odd—bouncers AND rollers, rfs AND nails, with only one obvious place that the nails are even useful—but they do generally fit the layout, filled with big open spaces instead of walls for the long-distance weapons to smash into. Everything is perfectly nice, just not quite exciting.

I missed this one when it came out. It's obviously much more visually detailed than A Titan, Ornery, with a more novel color palette and just more of everything everywhere. The stark contrast on the background mountains evoke DOS gaming or, yes, with help from the buildings, Batman: The Animated Series. The tubes are a lovely, reasonably subtle use of chromakey. Despite the different tilesets being blended together, nothing ever feels out of place, and there's just enough brightness contrast that it's easy to tell what's solid despite the panoply of decorations. Everything flows perfectly and is, as minmay noted, dangerous… my only worry is that it might be slightly too dangerous and there's not enough room to breathe or hide. That said, it's exciting/fascinating to see a level whose layout is fundamentally just a series of floating little platforms and yet still feels so deliberate.

There's a temptation—a narrative, perhaps—to say that Silent Cathedral is green!Hellfire, and I can't deny the resemblance. The use of Damn walls without Damn floors, in combination with Beach wood (especially diagonal wood), is of course very familiar. The big painful liquid at the bottom is another big tell, plus the occasional big vertical drops to the liquid (four in Hellfire, three here). Both levels have a number of one-tile-wide chimney areas with ammo pickups or carrots, though Silent Cathedral has them at the ends of vertical areas, and Hellfire's generally take more work to fall into. They're similarly sized. The cinders… I mean, okay, come on, that's just blatant.

On the other hand, there's undeniably a lot of Castle and Haunted House in this level that simply isn't present in Hellfire. And even little bits of Colon—there's one area with Colon streets on top of Castle bricks that doesn't seem to appear anywhere else, and is probably unnecessary, but still looks cool. So maybe the answer is that Silent Cathedral is a mashup of lots of sources, like a lot of recent multiplayer levels, and one of the sources it's mashing up is Hellfire. This answer would be more satisfying if I could identify specific other levels it's sourcing from, but look, there are a lot of levels out there, okay? Anyway, the birdcages feel nicely original, and it's neat to see the faster boomerang—zoomerang?—from Saline.

After all that I don't find I have too much to say about Silent Cathedral as a battle level. It has some interesting spots, like the boomerang powerup. I'm fond of the top of the level. I don't really see the point of making levels this size at the moment, like it's just going to relegate them to being performance art. It's fine. It's pretty.

It's tough to talk about the eyecandy in a level like this that uses a new, lovely tileset, because the temptation is there to blame it all on the tileset, rather than the level author. But we've all seen plenty of hideous levels using Nick's original sets, so it can't be that simple. So much of this level depends on how detailed the background is, filled with so many different layers with all different speeds. Numerous cave extensions use layer speeds that are not quite 1/1, artfully creating depth—this kind of layer use can be some of the most time-consuming but it can also look the best, helping the level to feel like a real place and not just a 2-dimensional cutout suspended in space. There's plenty of detail on the floors too, with animated grass and stacks of rocks, and the ceilings are all jagged in ways that don't interfere with gameplay. (On the other hand, I don't love the walls that appear jagged but are actually smooth due to invisible masks. And for that matter, I don't believe the level is really a mountain.) Everything feels deeply natural, in a detailed way… it's plausibly organic, not designed.

Unfortunately, the same can be said for the layout. I've been wandering the level for a while now, trying to review it, and nothing sticks out at me except for the giant empty space toward the left. Everything else feels like an inpainting algorithm. Lots of tunnels and thin wooden platforms everywhere, sometimes a powerup, and I'm just not convinced this all forms a cohesive whole. The thin vertical bits with the seeker ammo are kind of nice, though I don't even know that seekers are all that meaningful here. Making a Battle level is a different experience from a CTF level because there's no obvious structure you can depend on: you're not drawing paths between two bases on opposite ends of the level, you have to come up with your own flow. And I haven't been able to find the flow here.

One of the most normal of Lark's 2024 levels, without any strange weapon replacements. The pink sands look delicious, or rather lovely, and the background effects set up a nice little underground cave. You'd think pink on red might be hard to distinguish, but the brighter walls and darker skies contrast each other nicely. It's only a shame that the stalagmites rising out of the water don't have reflections of their own, you'd have to use vertically flipped tiles and some non-opaque sprite mode for that. Do the fuel tanks make sense thematically? I don't know, I haven't played Doom 1. But they work for platforming and maybe that's the important thing. Important items (two powerups, two carrots) are distributed at reasonable distances from each other, and there's no superfluous ammo types, though there's maybe room in the level for a few more pickups. I worry, though, that the level is a bit large and doesn't fully know what to do with its space, though the bottom right area with the big fuel tanks is a nice contrast to the rest. Otherwise the layout feels too generic. I like the bottom carrot, though, where you have to jump over the spring a little in order to grab it.

Without having played World of Warcraft, I have no idea how similar this level is to any canonical Raz'goth.

It must be said that the background looks fantastic. The yellow/pink from The Crackdown return, yet perhaps even more extreme. I think you could lean into the curve of the sky a bit by having the trees go higher up at the sides of the background, and lower down in the center, but that's hard to achieve with Diamondus. Layer 4 mostly works with the background colors, including the altered sprite palette—though the carrots are rather hard to see, despite the lighting—but I do dislike the background foliage in layer 5. There's too much contrast in every tile with the constant interplays of black leaves and bright yellow/pink background. The walls are decent but a little too close to the same single wall tile filled in everywhere.

I'm not quite sure what I make of the tar pits. They're fine, they don't get in the way, they just don't feel useful either. There's nowhere you have to use the tar pits to get to, you could always go by land if you wanted. There are no obvious goodies lurking down there. Further inspection reveals there's a coin warp, but it's invisible, and the carrot it takes you to is also invisible, so there's no way for players to know what they're getting. Isla de Meurta is a better example of how to use water like this, I think.

Above the tar pits, there's not much to say about the layout… it's big platforms that don't really suggest to me that much thought was put into them, similar to Lemondrop Labyrinth. There could be more ammo pickups in general. The replaced blaster animation is cool, the bouncer animation makes less sense.

Apart from the black leaves, this level looks great and is fun to vibe in, especially with the wacky music. But it doesn't have the gameplay to back it up. I would hang out here but I would not fight here. I'd be interested to see someone else take a crack at the tar pit idea, though…

I would love to love this—it's so cute and colorful! it's so earnest in its ideas!—but I also get caught up in how it plays and how it looks, and it needs some more time in the, uh… what is candy made in?

It must be said, the textured background looks fantastic, managing to look different at the top, middle, and bottom of the screen. Trying to place the candy cane posts in front of it makes some sense as an alternative to mountain layers, to show off more of the textured background, but they're just too high contrast. They clash with the sky and they clash with layer 4. The translucent autoscroll elements are fine though, silly but fine. Maybe as a middle ground, some cave-like background elements could be put here with colors similar to the sky, with layer speeds somewhere around 0.8/0.8? The actual caves are a bit too bright and repetitive, and most importantly, the walls are full of the classic Carrotus Tile Bugs. Yes, it takes more time to make a Carrotus wall that tiles properly, but it really looks ugly if you don't, especially when the brightness contrast is high like it is here. I'd take a look at other video games with candy themed levels and see how they construct their color palettes… short of like, Math Rescue, I suspect there's more leaning on softer colors in general. All the incidental Candion things on the grass and ceilings, the candy bars and lollipops and such, look fine though, it's hard to go wrong with a good little eyecandy thing standing around. It would be nice to have some of the lollipops be offset by 16 pixels vertically, though, for smoother slopes.

The weapons are not going to win many friends. The blaster is replacing with stationary exploding candy, which, well, I have a few questions:

- why does the candy explode?
- how is this supposed to hurt other players?
- why do you get bumped slightly to the right even when you fire the candy without moving sideways, preventing you from using it for TNT-climbing purposes?

I don't hugely mind the sprite replacements for seekers, there's a long history of pointless Commander Keen references. The increased RF speed throws people off a lot, it messes up all the RF tricks people are used to. But oddly it's the bouncers that offend me: you can't have a bunch of lemon pickups that are food, and then also use the same sprite for a weapon, and not have the pickups increase your ammo for that weapon. Either lemon use is fine, but not both.

The layout mostly feels random, like a slightly thicker South African Style battle with all its wide platforms, open spaces, and flat walls on either side of the map. The bottom is the most interesting part with its caves and its food supplies.

Thematically I like what this is doing, I do! It just needs to make some more compromises to be a playable multiplayer level at the same time.

This one doesn't do much for me. The design's not bad, but the visuals cast too broad a net.

The central oval of the layout, combined with the additional little loop in the top right corner, is pretty interesting. The little roller cutout near the bottom left may be too generous though, especially since it targets one of the only sources of seeker ammo, which is what you'd want to attack someone in that alcove. A third seeker area, maybe near the top somewhere, could help a bit, and would also make the seeker powerup a more desirable prize. 20 coins is a decent target number, though the coin script is a little off, using the candy sprite in some contexts and the coin animation in others. I want to like the awkward purple spring in the bottom right but it's a little too awkward even for me, too hard to predict/control whether you'll go through the one way events or not. Other parts of the layout are fine—good use of varying platform thicknesses, good powerup areas—I'm just not wild about some of the most vital places. Oh, and it's hard to make Boomerang work as a non-infinite weapon, and I don't think Pumpkin Park pulls it off.

The visuals are where things fall apart—they're close to good, but don't quite get there. cooba calls them "scattershot" and I think I like that. There are simply too many different tilesets being thrown together here, and because we can recognize the sources, the level doesn't feel like it has a proper identity. Especially bad are the upscaled graphics (rocks, pumpkins, trees) with no effort made to smooth their big pixels, and the wild Carrotus trees right next to the carefully maintained Townhouse trees. None of the weird random rock graphics overlaid onto the Holidaius texture look like they really fit in, the tree branch platforms in the bottom left are too muted to see, and the random Carrotus/Diam/Psych foliage thrown all over the place is too generic, yet inconsistent, for me to care about. The colors are all a little too muted and the background of Diamondus trees in front of Townhouse buildings is a little too familiar. The Omen Woods caves do look great, though.