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.