The Redacted Missions

  • Rating: 6.9

Reviews and comments

    Violet CLM 17 May 2018, 00:21

    This pack starts off rough. There are some scattered humorous text strings, which I appreciate, but otherwise the standard levels are primarily straight lines with turns at various intervals. (The first level doesn’t even have any turns at all, though you do spend it going left instead of right, which I suppose qualifies as novel.) There are a lot of enemies but none of them present any real challenge because the open level design gives you full control over whether they live or die, and the ammo, while quite plentiful, isn’t really necessary. Introducing pinball elements to the Damn tileset is an interesting notion but ends up being more inconvenient than interesting. Eyecandy is highly conceptual—an island with trees with in the background, multiple parallax layers used for lava to make it look 3D—but not very detailed, so the levels don’t tend to be too interesting to look at.

    The closest this pack has to a standout regular level is Titanic Tube Tussle, which has full-screen background layers, lots of direction changes, and enemies you actually need to pay attention to. The concept is straightforward but not bad: hit trigger crates to change which tubes are solid, so that the route ahead of you is forever changing. It works for a while but probably overstays its welcome, though the author does make a good effort to change things up after a while by introducing airboards to the mix. Where I think this level is lacking, though, is that even though you’re stomping a lot of trigger crates, you’re still not really thinking at all. The level looks like it should be a puzzle, but everything you need is always right in front of you, and you don’t have the agency to make your own way. Maybe you’ll feel impressed with the author for how well they arranged all the trigger scenery events, but it’s all on the author’s side and you’re not really contributing much. Also there’s surprisingly little backtracking until an airboard segment near the end, despite the trigger-crate-heavy level design almost begging for a chance to make areas harder each subsequent time you visit them.

    What you’ll remember from this pack is the final boss, which takes some inspiration from Gunstar Heroes and such but is still an original experience for Jazz 2. The boss has a bunch of different stages, which is something people generally enjoy, and they all(?) make good use of patterns instead of pure random attacks, meaning you feel you have a reasonable chance of beating the boss without taking any damage if you just get good enough at figuring out how it works. (This is further encouraged at higher difficulties, where carrots are reduced or nonexistent.)

    Download reluctantly recommended, but let me be blunt… unless you’re intending to write a review, you should probably just skip to hgfRMfinalboss, because the rest of the pack isn’t going to hold your attention.

    Did you think this was a good review? Yes/No

    ForthRightMC 4 Apr 2018, 08:41

    8Recommended:

    OK, so here is my review of levels:

    Level 1 – Welcome aboard the S.S.Fancy – Well, this level isn’t bad, especially using beach tileset and extra Diamondus trees tiles. The music “frolick Lane” is perfect for this level.

    Level 2 – Under the S.S.Fancy – This is the water level, the traps and ghost enemies fit perfectly for the level. Music also fits perfect for the level. About the boss, it isn’t very bad, Robot and Queen aren’t the worst threat, however Bloody_body offers you a scripted collisions of Robot from Plumbing Climbing level From the pack called Stone Abyss. This will make the boss very difficult to beat.

    Level 3 – Titanic Tube Tussle – This tubelectric level is very stressful because there are trigger crates and lots of ammo and enemies, however this doesn’t look bad for me.

    Level 4 – Small Circuit Skirmish – The short boss level, however I could buff Bolly up and prevent from stomping on his top like Bloody_Body did in Thunder Wander level of Stone Abyss.

    Level 5 – Heck’s Pinball – This level is good, lots of pinball objects, enemies and two bosses at the end. However this level will be played better if I choose Damn + Ice tileset from Holiday Hare ’17 pack and erase some of unnecessary tiles.

    Level 6 – A Duel of Green Beasts – The final boss of the episode is set perfeclty, however I used the RMFinalBoss.it music for the preparing for the fight, for the fight I use ckbroken.mo3 music from Holiday Hare ’17. Also, the perfect tileset for this level is once again Damn + Ice from Holiday Hare ’17, unlike the previous level, there aren’t any unnecessary tiles to erase. I will also use HH17_Roar.wav (jjSampleLoad(SOUND::BILSBOSS_APPEAR) “HH17_ROAR.wav”); and EXPSTD3.wav (jjSampleLoad(SOUND::COMMON_EXPL_TNT) “EXPSTD3.wav”); samples for this level.

    Summarizing, the pack isn’t so bad, I’ll give you 7.7/10.

    Download surely is recommended

    Did you think this was a good review? Yes/No

    Bloody_Body 7 Apr 2018, 17:57

    6

    Never liked labyrinth-like levels (sorry for tautology). But they aren’t that bad for a beginner.

    Most of the bosses are pretty easy to beat. For example, if you’re fast enough to reach Bubba and Bilsy before laser shield expires the fight literally is won within 1 second.

    I liked the mechanics of the last boss though.

    Did you think this was a good review? Yes/No

    SmokeNC 18 Sep 2018, 14:06

    9

    The levels aren’t interesting, but I enjoyed Titanic Tube Tussle and Heck’s Pinball. They also have too much ammo/enemies piled together. I’d only recommend this pack for the final boss, as it’s one of the coolest bosses I’ve ever seen in JJ2! And thus the rating.

    This is a short review. It has less impact on the upload's score.