Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

A pretty decent level pack, held down by some tilebugs, spring & pole sections not working as fluidly as intended partly due to the tileset and partly because of the level creator, lack of variety in pickups since you only get a few gems, apples the occasional carrot and a small amount of ammo.

Level 3 makes probably the most mistakes, you have to find 2 trigger crates and the first one is hidden behind shootable blocks that look like tileset walls that are just above soft lock pits (meaning it’s a pit that doesn’t hurt or kill you, you just remain in the fall animation at the bottom of the map, with cheating jjfly being the only way to get out). Also some of the vine areas can get you permanently stuck in the wall tiles if you press down at the wrong moment, leaving your character in a permanent buttstomp animation. The thing is, none of these issues are unfixable, just remove the endless pits, check the tileset masking with the vine areas, and the spring and pole areas, maybe add some variety to the pickups, though that shouldn’t be the priority while the other gamebreaking issues exist.

On the positive side of things, I think the level layout is pretty good, the choice of music is good, the level is pretty despite the tileset being somewhat simple. Enemy and item placement is okay too. This can easily be a 7.5-7.7 upload once the mentioned bugs are fixed (though given how this is a 14 month upload, I’m not sure it will happen), but for now I’ll give it a 6.7 with a download recommendation, since it’s a solid pack once you look past or avoid the bugs and oddities associated with the levels.

Hoping to see more

2 really nice looking jungle themed levels. I really love the visuals for this, and the music choice is fitting. One negative I have to mention is the fact that you used those ugly red X tiles to indicate trigger tiles, I think it’s unnecessary since they look out of place and the level design is already good enough for the player to see the trigger tiles appear, since the crate is in a position where you will see the tiles appear once the crate has been broken. Like Primpy said, the boss doesn’t fit the theme, the Tuf Turtle boss would have fitted better and functionally it works very similarly.

This is a pretty decent pack with 9 levels ranging from average to good.

I do think the level layout is competently done, so is the enemy placement, there are some copy paste sections, but not the very lazy type, more like the ones from JJ 1 or the Secret Files. Also, the 2nd Diamondus level picks up from where the 1st ends, which is a nice touch. I also really liked the atmosphere of the 3rd Diamondus level, something about that rust/gold tint with the low lighting made it rather appealing. One thing I think has room for improvement is the item pickups (sometimes lack thereof). Just like Violet also said, certain areas are complete empty, then you get to a point where you get 30-40 food items clumped together. Placing pickups not only make your levels feel more alive, but they also make the length of you level longer, since you won’t just be running in a straight line while shooting.

Another thing that was excluded was the coin warp. Wouldn’t call it an outright negative, but having an extra goal per level doesn’t hurt. A positive thing about the levels ranging from average to good is that there wasn’t anything particularly bad I noticed in them, so you have a pretty decent base from which you can improve when it comes to creating levels.

At first I thought there weren’t any secrets at all, but I did find 2, so they are either very well hidden or very few. I think the first level is actually the weakest, it’s the one where the lack of item placement is the most noticable. I initially wanted to give a 6.7 with a recommendation, but the levels mostly improved as I progressed, with no real low point luckily.

So I’m giving it a 7.2 with a download recommendation.

(note that after playing this pack, I feel like giving Diamondus 3 a score of 3 was too high, since you are capable of much better, which makes that lazy reskin even weaker in context)

Eh, what’s there even to say, it’s hard to give a rating or a review or any sort of opinion on this upload, since I don’t even know what it’s supposed to be. I mean yeah, I guess it’s categorised as a “Single Player” upload, but the level doesn’t seem to want to fullfill the list of things required to be called a single player level. You just drop into a (apart from the layout and pointless pickups) completely empty map without any purpose or goal of what you are supposed to be doing. Once you actually start exploring the level you realise it’s just a bunch of warps to different locations with seemingly no good reason. There’s a coin warp that just warps you back to where you came from (also, the gold coins respawn in the exact same room the coin warp is in).
Then you have another room that just gives respawning green gems. It’s one thing to add dozens of warps that progress the level in no particular way, but it’s another to give mostly no good indication of where these warps are. Sure some of them are in door textures but a lot of them are just randomly placed.
Also apart from a Dog I found, there are no enemies in the level, adding even more to the confusion of what this level is intended for. Are walking simulators a thing in platformers too?

The worst thing is that there is actually a complete level (as far as layout is concerned), so this whole thing could be salvaged by making it into a proper single player level, that would at the very least be decent (with sensible item and event placement of course).

I feel bad for giving it such a low rating, but there’s not much to recommend in this, since there’s no real point in playing the level. I don’t even know if it has an actual end or if it’s just a pointless loop inside a goalless level, since I didn’t even see an ending areas with end level triggers, but to be fair I only checked the level in the editor for about 2 minutes.
Maybe you guys can see what I can’t see and understand what this map is supposed to accomplish.

Check this out: https://www.jazz2online.com/downloads/9222/hose-my-live-20-d/

Perfect Pack! 10/10 HYPE

Oh, BTW in my own version I inserted boss music (Calling for Wisdom Uterus, Psychosis for Fooruman and Darkness for Dragon). I have them in MP3 format and is made by both Christopher Emirzian & Tim McFarland.

This pack is awesome. 9.2/10.

Also, I can make my own version of this pack by changing tilesets (mainly from Stone Abyss) and music (or leave the original tracks), and even adding AngelScript codes.

Well, well, well… Nice one Dragusela! 8/10!

BTW in my version I used Stone Abyss tileset of Carrotus and the texture background was made using MLLE.

Make good levels, especially the XLM ones!

good

I don’t have much to add to Stijn’s solid review. These are good levels for sitting back, tuning out, and playing some JJ2 with nothing else to worry about. I think the Carrotus levels are the weakest, feeling too rectangular and not very organic, but it’s nice to see the float lizard copters getting some use, even if not to the same extent as in The Big Rescue. It’s great that the layouts give you a lot of choices of which directions to go in and have lots of extra goodies just off the main road. There are a lot of uses of buttstomp blocks to mark out goodies just for Jazz or just for Spaz(/Lori), which mostly works well until the level with TNT, at which point they all start to be accessible to either character, and it’s not clear if the pack realizes this. Likewise, powerups and shields frequently appear behind thin walls that can be shot through with electroblasters or bouncers. But the variety of goodies and powerups is a welcome one (even birds and invincibility carrots make appearances), and they help against the enemies, which are fairly numerous but never feel particularly difficult when faced with so much ammo. It’s a good time to play.

Replaying this, I still enjoyed fighting the Lori clones, the urge to search for gems, and the handy seekers & bouncers that got me out of dire situations. The level’s short and pretty straightforward, with little secrets but a few alternate paths leading to green/blue gems. The powerup is nice but makes the boss easier than it already is. DL this!

Not amazing but not bad either.
Beating it with Lori is possible, too.

Hey! Thank you very much for all the reviews given by each of you!

I really appreciate the fact you enjoyed it, as well as all the criticism towards some of the issues! It surely gave me much advice for the future and motivated me to create more!

Love!

Thanks for the review, much appreciated! May I ask what you mean by the one way not working in the Colon level when you morph into a bird? Also in the first Beach level, did you get stuck in the spring and pole section? Did you play as Spaz or Jazz? Because I do recall Spaz having some difficulty in that area.

By the way, that bird morph gimmick was a compromise unfortunately, I wanted to make an underwater section, changing the water level several times to be able to break trigger crates, but giving maps a water level resets the lighting to 100% (something I wasn’t aware of), so I had to come up with the bird morph instead, otherwise the level lost atmosphere with full lighting in the sewer areas. The only reason I included the Uterus boss was because the game crashed every time I used the “End level” trigger events (no idea what caused it).

Edit: Odd, looks like the Bird has different hitboxes depending on if you morph from Jazz or Spaz, I played through the level multiple times as Jazz and never had the issue, but with Spaz the “one way” event didn’t work as intended, it does actually function though, but only if you try to pass through it while wallhugging the right side of the wall, it’s a rather weird bug. On the Beach level, I’m assuming it’s the spring at 145, 25. I’ve fixed that, it should work properly now

Primpy, didn’t test it with her, so that is a rather odd coincidence. Thanks for the review!

Edit: Thank you to everyone who reviewed the pack, much appreciated :)

As the description above discusses, this level pack is very much a continuation (or expansion?) of Epic’s original Jazz Jackrabbit 2 levels. Same tilesets, same music, same enemies, pickups and other gameplay elements. In a way, that is refreshing in 2022, where scripted gimmicks have become the norm. ‘Nostalgia Pack’ proves that that isn’t required for a fun single player episode; the levels in here are quite solid, and overall fun to play.

Similarly to abgrenv’s previous levels, these offer multiple paths to the finish, as levels usually aren’t completely linear but rather consist of a series of relatively open areas connected by a single tunnel or warp – the latter preventing the player from becoming lost. That is a welcome break from Epic’s style of level design, actually, and encourages exploring and discovering the many secrets hidden in the levels.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some issues with them. Notably, I got stuck twice; once in the part of the Colon level where you morph into a bird (the one way doesn’t work) and once in the first Beach level, where a tile blocked me from reaching a spring. The foreground and background layers also don’t seem to support 800×600, probably because they were simply copied from the official levels. More thorough testing might have been useful here, but apart from those issues, I fortunately didn’t encounter any major bugs.

The larger issue for me was that it all started to feel a bit stale after a couple of levels. Sure, the levels are competently made, and there are hidden gems, food and powerups to discover; but that can only obfuscate the fact that all levels follow the same formula for so long. There are no bosses to change the pace either, except for a Uterus at some point, which abgrenv didn’t even try to make interesting (and the level says as much). I would have appreciated a bit more variety in the level design; even the official levels contained many features not used here, such as smoke rings, speed blocks or potentially challenging enemies like floating suckers.

Overall, it feels like more could’ve been made of the premise. But this is still a fine level pack, and worth playing if you have some time to kill and feel like blasting through a couple of oldschool JJ2 levels again.

Edit, RE: Yes, in Beach it was the pole and spring section, as Spaz; and the issue with the bird section in Colon was that the one way simply didn’t seem to want to let me pass, so I never reached the revert morph and trigger zone.

This level pack has the potential of becoming the Devres of the Plus era, and that’s not something to be taken lightly. Although there are some minor shenanigans that could be prevented in the next part (assuming there’ll be more) or with an update to this one.

The episode starts with a scrolling intro, where the story is so straightforward that it’s main purpose is to make fun of itself. This is surprisingly followed by a tutorial level that teaches the basics of Jazz’s moveset in a similar fashion to ‘Rabbit in Training’ in the original JJ2 campaign. While this tutorial arguably does a better job explaining the basics than the original, it’s incredibly weird to see it in an episode that quickly gets brutally hard compared to the original levels.

All the levels are carefully designed. Eyecandy is everywhere and its amount and placement always feels natural. Same goes for lighting in caves and the matching color schemes in the backgrounds. The levels are mostly designed around familiar JJ2 gameplay although there are some exceptions such as the floating rock ride in ‘River Ride or River Die’ and swimming with limited oxygen in ‘Swim For It!’.

Food and gems, while not serving any purpose due to the removal of Sugar Rush, are everywhere and fun to collect. Exploration is often rewarded with coins, which do serve a purpose as the coin warp near the end of each level is the only means of getting 1-ups! Carrots can be found often but not always on the straight path, sometimes a risky jump is necessary to get one. Ammo is relatively scarce but the levels are designed around its usage pretty well, just make sure to conserve it for those occasions.

Enemies are mostly placed where they form a fair challenge instead of just being cannon fodder. Except for the bats in the latter half of the pack, they’re often hard to notice and feel like a cheap trick that JCSers try to avoid nowadays. Oh, the ghosts in the temple section of ‘Swim For It!’ can be annoying as well, they’re invincible and eager to attack, unlike what a hint message near them says. What is lovable however, are the intuitive test-like Airboard sections spread across the levels.

Overall it’s a pack clearly aimed at the experienced JJ2 player. I highly recommend it if you believe you fall into that category. I played on Hard and enjoyed the extra health enemies had. Button mashing JJ1-style is so satisfying! The many things I enjoyed here really made up for the few frustrating design elements, and I’m a sucker for cheap humor so..

This is a strange level pack. For one, it starts with a wordy tutorial for basic Jazz Jackrabbit 2 mechanics that speaks to the player like they’re a baby who’s never played not only JJ2, but any video game, providing insight such as, and I quote, “to shoot press SHOOT button.” This approach of placing signs with lengthy messages explaining standard mechanics continues far into the level pack, telling you, among other things, how every new standard weapon you collect works. It’s somewhat baffling; aside from a snarky remark very early on, it’s played too straight and goes on for too long for me to perceive it as ironic, and this information appears useless not only to anyone familiar enough with JJ2 to venture into user-generated content, but also, honestly, to people who have never played the game before. “Show, don’t tell” became good standard practice in teaching game mechanics over a decade ago; JJ2 itself does it, in a sense – it never tells you how a weapon you’ve just collected works, you fire it and find out! I want to give the author the benefit of the doubt and trust that this is just a weird aesthetic choice, but it does have the unfortunate side effect of wasting players’ time. It also has a side effect of making me cringe whenever attempts at comedy show up in the messages – the sense of humor in the pack is one that used to be really popular in media maybe 20 years ago, exhausted its potential back then, and nowadays sounds dated, unoriginal, and somewhat infantile to me.

What’s odd is how much this tutorialization of game basics stands in stark contrast with the actual difficulty of the pack. You should most likely not pick this up if you’re actually new to the game. I didn’t struggle with it personally but I can recognize that this is a fairly hard campaign. An unexpected difficulty spike occurs right in the middle of the pack, in River Ride or River Die, which is the only level that made me river-die, and a couple times at that – it appears that the level designer recognized this too, as it’s the only level that provides you with a free extra life right at the start, as if to say “this is the part where you die a lot.” Most deaths in the pack will probably be delivered to players by instant death pits, which is pretty much par for the course in packs that contain them. For credit where credit is due, I thought the pits were marked exceptionally well, with some sort of sign indicating danger almost every time they would show up. That said, despite being a feature that doesn’t make an appearance in the main JJ2 campaign, somehow they’re one of the few things the tutorial messages won’t actually tell you about, go figure (aside from offhandedly mentioning “the deep chasms” while discussing buttstomps).

Something else the tutorial messages say is to collect everything you can, for a simple reason: points. I think that’s the crux of one of the major issues with the pack. While the levels aim to encourage exploration by being full of optional paths and secrets, in practice there is little of value anywhere. The main pickups used throughout the campaign are gems, food, coins, and sometimes ammo and carrots. Gems are not given any new purpose via scripting, and the sole purpose of food – the sugar rush – is actually intentionally stripped away. Collecting enough coins allows you to access a bonus warp at the end of each level, which grants you access to… more gems and food, generally, plus usually one extra life. As far as I can tell, only one weapon power-up shows up throughout all these levels, and it’s on the main path where you can’t miss it, so that the pack can stick a tutorial sign next to it. JJ2 has so many ways to reward exploration – power-ups, shields, bird cages, invincibility carrots, even ammo that’s otherwise rare – and maybe I just somehow threaded the needle and missed all that good stuff, but I have not seen a single one of those things. It is 2022; “points” will not do. Watching a number go up is only exciting if that number serves a purpose. Additionally, I counted about 3 invisible, unmarked points of no return created with the Limit X Scroll event, that, if you unknowingly trigger them, may cause you to permanently miss pickups on optional paths, for no obvious reason, further hurting the exploration aspect of the gameplay. On the bright side, carrots, while not exciting, made the exploration somewhat worth it on occasions, and I applaud the choice of coin warp prices, which are just lenient enough that you should never miss them if you dedicate time to exploring, even if you fail to find some of the coins.

Now that my main gripes with this upload are covered, on to some of the positives; the levels are gorgeous. All of them are consistently beautiful. At times this is done to a fault – sprites can easily become hard to see in some locations, but it’s not a prevalent flaw. They are also very consistent in the selection of JJ2 features they use – if something shows up, it will show up again, no weird one-offs. Yet the pack doesn’t quite get boring and tries to mix and match different mechanics, present them in different contexts, and every once in a while break up traditional platforming segments with an airboard section. I can appreciate that. Most levels are fairly traditional, but several have a prevalent and more noticeable theme in their mechanics, especially the aforementioned River Ride or River Die. Aside from occasional rolling rocks thrown at you without warning at ridiculous speeds, and the rather mundane rock pushing sections, the challenges are quite fair and enjoyable. Collapsing scenery is used often enough that you know to expect it, and it’s quite consistently used on the same set of tiles. Usually masking is also what you would expect – there are some exceptions to that, but nothing too bad. Some of the early levels have slopes that make you run down them, and those are a weird choice that probably could’ve been cut. I never quite got used to what looks like normal JJ2 slopes making me suddenly accelerate, and they’re never used for anything interesting.

Lastly, as a note that didn’t fit elsewhere, at least one midway level where you can save your game would be a massive quality-of-life improvement. This is a fairly lengthy pack and making players finish it all in one sitting is asking a lot.

Overall, this was a bit of a mixed bag. The part of me that enjoys platforming and combat was reasonably satisfied, and the explorer in me was disappointed. As a veteran player I found the difficulty to be adequate, but was constantly confounded by the presence of tutorial messages treating me like I’m using the computer for the first time. I’m giving this pack an 8 because the things it does well, it does very well, and it’s worth playing through. Even experienced JJ2 level designers can learn a lot from this. Just try to only learn the good things.

A really fun xmas themed level. Level design is extremely open ended, it’s almost designed like a regular multiplayer map would be, obviously bigger. I think the level flows really well. You can go whereever you want, and as far as I’m aware the only point of no return is with the boss fight, this gives you time to explore the entire level and check out every corner you want, since the level design facilitates (or more appropriately recommends) having a look around.
The difficulty is pretty much my cup of tea, where it’s not extremely punishing, but you still need to play attention. Plenty of pickups to look for, as well as secret areas. To be honest, I feel like the single checkpoint you placed in the level is unnecessary though. When I died, I would have preferred a clean start from the beginning of the level, since it’s designed in an open ended fashion anyway.

The music choice is fitting, it’s a calm and nice tune.

My only minor complaints are that the level could have had 1-2 more enemy types in it, and that the boss fight was sort of meh (though that’s mostly thanks to how bosses are pretty 1-note in the game anyway)

Overall I think this is a really well made level, worth having a run-through and exploring it. Definitely recommend everyone to give it a go.

A pretty good level pack, a bit too difficult and dickish for my liking. The level design visually is awesome, with equally fitting music. It’s pretty obvious that the level designer worked a ton on the aesthetics and the item/enemy placement also looks like every single placement was thoroughly thought out, so basically every dick move in the levels are completely intentional (bats in front of death pits, checkpoints after difficult platforming areas rather than before, no saving allowed, death pits that aren’t obviously death pits due to the game resolution, copter lizards in very awkward spiked areas etc)

Though I’m not the target audience for this level pack, I can’t look past all the things that I loved about it. The humor in the text messages are funny, and an enjoyable read. The levels look pretty as hell. The level design/layout itself is well thought out apart from the deathpits. The choice of music is great and fitting.

Despite the difficulty not being my cup of tea, I’m pretty confident in recommending this since all this work deserves to be seen.

 “Jazz Jackrabbit 2,5 – The Big Rescue” is one of the best JJ2 single player level packs to come out in a while. With 7 lengthy levels and one boss level, it manages to implement lots of gameplay mechanics and set the story and tone for the future parts to come. Instead of covering each individual level in this review, here’s an overview of my thoughts on this pack.

• The visuals range from pleasant to gorgeous. The level creator clearly knows how to make a level look pretty.
• Good introductory level. It’s simple enough for someone new to the game to understand the game mechanics, yet still fun for more experienced players.
• Fitting music choices for each level.
• Little to no tile bugs.
• Diverse gameplay mechanics that don’t overstay their welcome.
• Sign text is both witty and informative.

• Instant death pits. They can be tolerable, but not in this level pack. 1-UPs are scarce and the pack is already pretty challenging as is. One slip of the finger and you might end up having to replay the entirety of a lengthy level.
• The gameplay can be a bit unfair at times, with unexpected collapsing scenery and obstacles that are too difficult to avoid.
• There’s no way to save your game. You’ll have to finish the entire episode in one sitting.
• Invincible ghost enemies in a claustrophobic area of the game. Ugh…
• The text has some typos here and there. The most obvious one would be “2,5” instead of “2.5”. This is just a trivial nitpick though.

• The README file says that this pack was made with 640×480 screen resolution in mind. I played it in 800×600 and I believe this resolution works just as well as the intended one.
• Sugar Rush and Fast Fire events were removed from these levels. I think this was a change for the better, but different people might disagree with me.
• This is a challenging level pack and you will most likely die a bunch of times. I recommend playing it on Easy difficulty if you’re not very confident in your skills.