Tileset, by 
Gus tilesets, despite his community acclamation as “most improved,” are always rather hit or miss, and I find that a good scale for judging their quality is how much time has elapsed since his last release. In this case, it doesn’t seem to have been long enough, and Gus has largely reverted here to his old, lazier habits of tileset creation, including the incredibly thorough isometric perspective from Pyramid 3D, A Candion Day, Ancient Tiles, and so on. At least in layer 4, Technology (to which I feel it is fair to abbreviate it) is geometrically pristine and well-thought-out but offers little to nothing of any interest. I’m not sure if this is a set drawn with nothing but the sprite colors, but it definitely looks that way, especially since the sprite colors themselves are just as unsaturated.
Technology offers you three ground types (grass, rooftop, and rooftop garden) atop three soil types (dirt, light gray solid, dark gray solid) with, presumably, all the appropriate connecting tiles you could ever want. The attention to detail in this department is so thorough that there are tiles for the transition from layer 3 to no layer 3 in the bottom right corners of dirt walls. The dirt has no texture — nothing in the tileset does, apart from the big yellow blocks and a couple background bits — but its edges are curvy in contrast to the straight lines and exact, divisible angles that are most of the rest of the set. It’s competently drawn, and yet, as I’ve stated with regards to Islands of the Sapphire Sea, the graphical style does not appeal to me and it’s pulled off better there anyway.
All the nature stuff looks good. The grass is nicely wavy, the broken glass is amazingly well done, the girder bridge from the example level is very attractive (although it would be better were the angle on the isometric perspective a little less extreme.) There are some nice bush tiles and a bunch of alien plants which are inexplicably unanimated but otherwise quite nice. Apart from lamp posts, there’s really nothing comparable for the street/rooftop tiles, which don’t even offer the luxury of being sloped. Gus provides some giant 2×2 block tiles of a few different styles to vary up the technology parts of layer 4, but the isometric perspective looks its absolute worst here: the yellow block edges don’t look 3D (or look 3D in the wrong way), the beveled pyramid edges are difficult for the eye to process, and the metal block edges are obvious victims of resize and skew tools. For no ground type is there any opportunity for soil variety as you see in Carrotus or Diamondus or the like.
The tile order in Technology is atrocious. Let me see if I can figure it out. We start with the basic masked tiles for the main ground types, well and good. The main parts for the rooftop, though, are at 1,2 and 1,8, separated by a lamppost and not connected to the tiles that are their more obvious cousins. This slows things down immensely. Immediately below this are some tiles for layer 7, and then the alternate rooftop garden floor tiles, along with some missing tiles (such as corners) from the themes already introduced. Some stuff I don’t recognize (more lampposts?), more tiles from layer 7, and then layer 8. Next are some miscellaneous eyecandy tiles for layer 4 — fences, layer 3 tricks, and another lamppost — and then an alternate layer 8 and a bunch of tiles for layer 6, followed by more layer 7 and more layer 4 eyecandy, followed by a whole new layer 4 theme that goes on for many rows of tiles (the 2×2 blocks). Also, slopes. Then more layer 4 eyecandy (bushes) and all of a sudden layer 5 appears, along with more layer 6, and then the tileset finishes itself off with more layer 8, event tiles, and a cave for the grass walls. In short: it’s absolute chaos. Layer 5 is the only one whose tiles are in any way kept in only one part of the set. Basically they’re in the order Gus probably drew them and no effort was made to help the user find anything.
I’ve brought up the background some times now, but I didn’t want to mention it while discussing layer 4, because they’re really different, even though they use the same colors. Layer 4 is a passable, uninteresting tileset with limited eyecandy and an over-reliance on isometric walls. Layers 5-8 make a gorgeous background — which long seems to be Gus’ speciality — that can be manufactured in many different ways and is all very innovative and complex. The tile order gets in the way, of course, but if you can figure out what goes where you end up with something very pretty for which the limited palette really does work. Layer 8 is untextured and is an effect Gus has played with before, where there are several layers of buildings (previously mountains) in front of one another with different single colors. It looks cute and trippy. The rest is rooftop gardens, highways, aliens, buildings, and so on, and it’s all really good. If anything, the mistake the rest of the set makes is that it doesn’t realize that backgrounds are an inherently different graphical style and tries to be a zoomed-in version of the background.
In sum, the set looks gorgeous, but the less time you can spend looking at layer 4, probably the better, because there’s little there to distinguish it from any other tileset and it’s just too angled. The isometric perspective can look great when it’s more subtle — see Medivo, HH98, maybe Colon but your mileage may vary — but this is too extreme. What this tileset would work really well for is a cutscene or an intro level or something similarly nonplayable. Let a camera move around through this futuristic city, put on some appropriate music, add a lot of text events, and then throw the player into a gameplay level. That’d be gorgeous. But don’t attempt to do anything else because the tileset will only frustrate you in your attempts.
