I’m not thrilled with the secret level entrances, particularly the Tubelectric one, but I guess they’re not horribly out of line with existing JJ2 secrets… if this were really part of the game, eventually players would have found them over a period of months or whatever. Still, more visual cues would have been nice I think. But whatever that’s not the focus here.
Far Out is actually pretty good in terms of new event placement while sticking to the existing psych3 level. There’s a decent variety of pickups and enemies, and the little pipe organs on the platforms after the warp target are a good touch that make that area much more interesting to navigate. The new parts of the layout kind of lose me, though. The idea of warping through a bunch of little rooms (kind of like in Medivo1) is nice but eventually I got tired of hunting for trigger crates, and there are too many invisible warps and weird blocks that need to be destroyed or removed in unpredictable ways.
The other, all-new level here, though, Pinball Land, I actually really liked. Toward the end it gets annoying in the part when you track down four trigger crates behind lots of layer3 and stuff, but the rest of the level is I think a really good take on a Tubelectric secret level. There are clever pinball tables, and crucially, they’re not all at once, they appear from time to time within the level so they don’t get stale. There are spike platforms, one of Tubelectric’s other main unique features. Goodies feel fairly plentiful and the graphics are nice and varied. This is a nice one.