Well, I betatested this lvl ages ago, then, yesterday, told myself to review it and reminded myself that you should never postpone until tomorrow what you should’v done today…and then I postponed it till tomorrow. :-( Well, after a loooong time, here is my review:
Cake Cream Snowland (CCS) is a small 71×64 battle lvl. It has 2 carrots and every single power-up that does 2-heart damage, except the blaster PU (that’s 4 power-ups in total). Now that I think about it, 3 carrots would be better than 2, considering the amount of fire-power in the lvl and it’s a pretty small lvl too, so you won’t stay full-health for long. Betatesters screwed up. Again…
The background eyecandy is reasonably nice. The little cake-platforms look nice, although I would’ve appreciated it if they stayed with you at the top of the lvl (make them hiiigher!). The foreground eyecandy is a bit empty and it seems as if the tileset just doesn’t allow Pan Galactic Garble Blaster-type eyecandy. ;-) I still think Arti should’ve taken the opportunity to at least make some foreground platforms inside the many large, thick walls of the lvl, which shouldn’t get in the way of anyone’s sight and still look good.
Weapons placement is ok, except that there are not enough fastfires (you’ll never stay alive long enough to get your private minigun :-p) and there are too many power-ups. It would be nice if you could just force players to stomp a power-up or to shoot it with electroblasters, so ppl will actually take the normal 3x ammo and bouncers from the gun barrel.
Gameplay is where it’s at! :-O CCS has much better gameplay than it has eyecandy or weapons placement. The pole kinda slows you down and there’s a lot of open space for ppl to not be able to dodge bouncer, seeker and RF barrages although I guess public server battle freaks will like the carnage and the multi-kills possible in this lvl. Springs and platforms are sensibly placed, except the kind of floating white stairway in the middle, which is Spaz biased and really forces Jazz to either slow down with superjump…or slow down with jumping from one platform to the next. Spaz can just swoop by with one or two doublejumps. Also, the platform at pos 17, 3 is 1 tile too high. You can still run over it, but if you haven’t got enough speed, you’ll just fall down whether you like it or not (UNLESS YOU’RE SPAZ! :-P).
Frankly, I don’t know why the heck I didn’t mention all the above things when I betatested but this lvl is mostly flawless, but its layout fails to give players anything more to do than to launch mini-ICBM attacks on their opponents from afar. Ok, there’s toaster walls, bouncers from above and suckertubes in the mix. It’s an ok lvl, nothing remarkable, but still better than hanging in front of the TV, duelling battle 1 or writing reviews like this.
CCS deserves a 6.7. This lvl is a judgement call but I hope my review will convince you to DL and try the lvl out.