I decided to review this level, I like to do that by seperating the review into two parts. First I want to talk about what went right and secondly what I think could be better. That said, let’s start the review.
What did it get right?
Inside the freezer has a theme that builds upon. Using the multiple tilesets, it mixes the cold blue tint frozen feel of the level together with the steel/industrial feel of a freezer. The music works for this level and everything together makes this levelname quite believable.The colouring in this level is pretty, because it blends well together (although a small nitpick would be that the dark blue platforms are a bit too dark and the fans in the background are too bright). For the most part it has a nice offset between a brightness in sprite layer and a dark background. This creates depth in the level. Always try to think of what you want to place together and what you want to seperate, make distinct choices so the player can more easily understand the level. This makes the level look more clean and professional. I hope to see more of that in the future. So far from all Dragusela’s levels on J2O, this is his best implementation of theme and it really shows he grows as a levelmaker to make distinct areas and adds tiles within that theme.
The gameplay, for a some parts definitely looks better than your previous levels. This level feels easier to move around in, it is more open, it is more practical. It flows better than other levels. This doesn’t have uncounterable camping like before. I can remember in your first levels it used to have powerups in extremely safe spots, luckily this level doesn’t have that.
Where is room for improvement?
Although this level does some things right, it also shows a lot of room for improvement. There’s a certain randomness to a lot of the level aspects, which makes it feel chaotic and unprofessional. It’s a bit much to name, so I’m just going to start a list of things you can expect to find in Inside the freezer: Secret warps that have no visual indication (I had to look in MLLE to find it), ground tiles that also unexpectedly become foreground tiles, inconsistency with one-way floors, confusing layer speeds that move slower than the layer behind it, ceilings that randomly stop existing and turn into foreground, floors that could be just floors but instead has bridges behind foreground scenery (also had to look in MLLE to find this), the unconvincing perspective that a huge background is seperated from the sky by a mere 1 tile waterfall, inconsistency on whether steel support beams are masked or unmasked, missing masks to prevent players running in the edges of the map, missing mask edits for inferno to stop players from standing near ceilings, dead ends without any pickups, springs that don’t reach high enough or are too high or are missing completely, the copter respawning too slow, pulse lights that don’t do anything because the ambient lighting = 100, ricochets causing bullet desyncs in multiplayer. Wew, this is quite a lot… I think it can be helpful to look into these again and imagine how this is from the player perspective and what you can do differently. I think most and foremost: Try to stop combining your layer 3 with layer 4 this much. They are not interchangeable and shouldn’t be. Layer 3 should only really be mixed into the playable area to hide small areas or for small scenery, not hide entire masked layouts.
Anyway, I hope to see more levels and I hope to see you continiuing levels, because I can definitely see some improvement.