Battle, by 
Inferno is not necessarily the first tileset I think of when I imagine a golden opportunity to make brilliant levels. Despite the fact that it was my second favorite planet in Jazz 2 (TSF’s Turtleville is still the best), let’s face it: The tileset is buggy, the eyecandy is just plain hard to use, and the tileset is incredibly monotonous.
Allow me to put your mind at ease when I say that while it may be a hair on the monotonous side, Purple Jazz’s Pit of Necrosis is certainly none of those other things.
For one thing, the level looks just plain awesome. PJ took a tileset that was originally supposed to be a frozen wasteland and turned it into a lonely, windy boneyard completely appropriate for a battle level. No piece of eyecandy is used the same way twice, as he made good use of the various images of skeletons and bones and musty old skulls in several different layers, putting one in the foreground here, while placing it in the background there. There were even a few random bones lying on the ground, which I thought was a cute (depending on how you look at it) little touch. I especially liked the “bone pile” in the lower left corner of the map, built up to look like a bunch of giant animals just fell on top of each other and died.
But he didn’t stop there, utilizing a trick that I myself am a big fan of (if it’s used right), which is creating side paths as eyecandy in the level. In random areas of Necrosis, PJ put a few little alternate roads under certain areas and behind certain walls, preventing you from accessing them, but ever increasing the visual size of the level.
Necrosis was a nice and wide open level, but not in the sense that it was empty and boring. Oh, no no no. There were a number of paths stuck on top of paths on top of paths, leaving a truckload of escape routes by which to avoid your attackers, which means it’s easy to get lost here. And in my book, if a level can do that successfully, it’s a good thing.
I wasn’t too crazy about some of the little scattered text strings PJ used, but let’s not drag personal views into a perfectly good review.
There was also very fine bug management control, and for a tileset like this, that’s terrific.
Remember all the anvil-shaped platforms? Well, Purple Jazz found a unique (although not original) way to deal with it, making the very edges one-way. In fact, I had a hard time finding anything wrong buggage-wise here.
Layer 8 and the surrounding background layers were a bit bland, in my opinion, but not intolerably so. I didn’t mind too much after a while.
I didn’t download the music track for this level (since the last time I tried something like that, I got a vicious spyware virus that knocked out my internet for nine months), but if PJ took as much care with that as with this level, I’m sure it works just fine.
I was disappointed, though, that some of the platforms were just out of the reach of normal jumping (and no springs were around), which meant that you either had to get a running start (if you even had enough room to do that), or else just uppercut/double jump, which can cost precious time in a battle.
In addition, I tried and I tried, but I could just not get into the Seeker warp at the top of the level. Unless there’s some newfangled gameplay trick out there that I don’t know about (And that’s entirely possible), it’s not accessible at all, except by using singleplayer cheats.
My biggest major problem with this level is, as I originally pointed out, it IS a bit on the monotonous side. I mean, you can only go so far with a black+gray+white color scheme (There was a little orange in the background, however). I would’ve maybe put a light dusting of dark red into the level (or the set, if you modified it yourself), and that would’ve made it so much better. But this is a small nuance, and it doesn’t irk me as badly as others might have.
In short, I think that Pit of Necrosis is a pretty darn good level, if I do say so myself. Perfect for a brawl between a large number of players, or a really long two-player contest. Download today, compliments of the reviewer.
