Whoa, whoa, and once more whoa.
Visual Appeal – 4 out of 5
It will be hard for me to describe this without abusing the expression whoa, but I’ll have to give it a shot nonetheless. Anyway, I’ll have to say that I don’t really like the palette edits in the Labrat v2 (like I aptly call them) sets. I definitely don’t like the palette of the sixth tileset, which just hurts my eyes and shows that the soil texture doesn’t really tile with itself (like in Diamondus). I also don’t like the contrast between the metal plates and the soil in fourth tileset, and fifth’s general color scheme. Sorry :|
Enough complaints. I’m gonna be blunt and say that the Tubelectric and Letni tilesets are AWESOME, PWNAGE, L33TAGE AND ALL THE WAY BEYOND. I LOVE the concept behind the Tubelectric tileset here, I’m surprised no one has even attempted to bring JJ1’s Tubelectric style back onto its JJ2 cohort, which did lack a certain feel. Now, all the identity troubles are GONE!!! Who really cares if NOKA did use Agama’s tiles to back up the tileset, it looks great and Agama herself probably wouldn’t mind.
The additions to the Tubelectric are great, such as the spikes I’ve long awaited for, the belts using JJ1’s tiles which look great, the warps, the signs (stolen from Haze’s muckamok but no one should mind), the 5th palette which looks reminiscent to Industrius, it looks great and takes the old Tubelectric tileset to a whole new level. Great job here, and I mean great. The only thing I’m not too fond of is the 3rd Tubelectric set, which has, um, ugly bricks D: Everything else is sweet.
And now that I’m done praising the brilliant Tubelectric, I’m onto Letni now. And guess what? It’s as amazing as Tubelectric. In some places it was so amazing I couldn’t resist staring at it. Like taking Labrat’s monitors and giving them Letni’s red glow. It was so genious that my jaw has dropped. To sum it up shortly, it’s like Tubelectric, except just made to look like Letni. I’m going to cut it here, just download this and look over the set yourself already, the potential reader. No more spoilers for you D:<
Usability – 5 out of 5
I honestly have no gripes here. In most of the tilesets, the palette color events will work fine. The tilesets are extremely easy to use, for they are moderately blocky. The Labrat tileset is also made a lot easier, and has tiles which its precedssor greatly lacked, such as slopes. The mask is as smooth as it can get, there’s really not a little problem here; these tilesets are a JCS user’s dream.
Summary- Great improvement over the original official tilesets.
- Generally great work, shows that a lot of thought went into the tilesets
- Tubelectric owns owns owns, need I say more?
- Some of the palette edits just won’t work well.
- Labrat could use some more stuff. Such as better background tiles? Who knows.
Overall
Definitely the successor tilesets for the official ones. They have what the officials had, what they lacked, and much more than that. If there’ll be someone who continues on using the default Labrat or Tubelectric tilesets, they’ll sure have to be insane. Even if one may not like the palette changes, there are still tilesets with the palettes remaining unchanged. So all in all, download this, use this, and review this. Saphir has underrated this heavily, 7.2 is definitely too low for this. If it wasn’t for the Labrat tileset a little lacking, I’d gladly give this a higher rating.