Edit (May 24., 2015): Most of the flaws discussed in my original review included below have been taken care of. Some perhaps extensively – the spike ball challenge room became somewhat trivial, with safe spots, hardly any actual spike balls, and respawning seeker ammo that you can collect for many minutes and use against all enemies from that point on. The boss on the other hand might’ve become overpowered; the second phase of the fight seemed fairly random to me, with my victory depending mostly on the order of moves he decided to use. I also encountered some other minor bugs I didn’t see before but won’t bother to list. Overall, however, the changes are a major improvement, the level has consistently good quality and a variety of gameplay concepts, and it’s now fun to play.
Aforementioned original review (rated 7.5) available below for reference and historical purposes:
Decent, but with tons of flaws.
New weapons are nearly completely useless and, where they could be useful, it turns out the modified fireball can’t shoot upwards and bombs deal only 1 damage point to Bubba enemies, don’t explode on contact, and bug enemies up.
Many of the enemies are mostly really tiring to kill rather than difficult, especially the Bubba ones generally require a hit and run strategy that is very safe but can easily take half a minute to take down a single one of them.
Loads of bugs occur, besides the aforementioned bombs that have really bad effects on Bubba enemies, spike balls go through walls and all over the place, making otherwise easy areas completely random hell, enemies can spawn at the player’s position without any chance for escape, falling onto the floor without having activated a certain platform can get you stuck there, and Spaz can completely skip the most difficult challenge in the level, which then never ends, causing palette issues.
Said most difficult challenge inconsistently keeps progress over separate lives, unless you had finished it already, in case of which when you die it counter-intuitively restarts from the beginning, and is overall unfair, involving not as much skill as shooting while getting hit constantly in hope enough spike balls are destroyed before you run out of blinking time and health. I could believe it involves some skills or strategy but the spike balls can very well spawn directly above you and quickly fall down, or even spawn at your current position. There’s no way to predict that, if you’re unlucky, you’re simply going to die. On the other hand, the challenge room that precedes it is much easier but has issues too – most importantly, after you kill the initial wave, it runs out of enemies and you have to wait for several seconds before anything new appears. Generally exactly on your position, dealing damage even though you were well prepared to fight.
As far as I could tell, the coin warp requires all coins in the level, which is a bad design decision that means everything you collected will be useless if you didn’t find one single secret. The level also contains gems which it gives no special purpose to, so that’s a sort of a wasted opportunity.
Tweedle is perhaps the greatest disappointment. After the life-draining spike ball challenge I was convinced I’d face a hard to defeat final boss, but instead I saw a nerfed version of the first stage of Devan Shell, who later transformed into a complete joke of a boss that can be beaten simply by periodically pressing the down arrow, after getting him onto one of the platforms in the arena. Or well, that was the case before the recent update – after that, his first stage can actually be called significantly more difficult to kill with blaster than Devan is, but you can always just pull out RF missiles and still finish it within a couple of seconds; and the second stage didn’t change much, maybe just that I now have to occasionally press left or right too to aim the buttstomp better. Granted, he would fit in well with the entire rest of easy to kill official JJ2 bosses, but certainly doesn’t fit the spirit of the level, which aims to be more ambitious than the official levels.
As for the upsides, I really like how enemies drop ammo, and not just any, but the kind that’s actually associated with them, even if they drop so little and so rarely that it’s not extremely helpful. The visuals and mechanics of the moving platforms are really nicely done. The variety of enemies is cool, with the new ones offering original mechanics. Secrets are spread around well, generally offering hints and not being too hard to find. The scenery is somewhat bland but acceptable. I suppose with the exception of challenge rooms and the boss it’s fun to play overall.