Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

This level has got all that is required in a good CTF level: paths, well placed ammunitions, powerups, eyecandy, a background, and that egg crate addition.
It’s rather small for a CTF arena, but still, it’d be fun to see 32 players challenging eachother in this arena.

nice, short level with enough eyecandy, lots of pickups and normal difficulty :) definitely worths a download along with its forgotten tileset

an old, interesting and challenging level. annoying respawning bees and a bit hard to find all coins, but very entertaining ^^

Well, I don’t think this level is bad enough to rate it 3-3.5 Typical “first levels” are usually worse than this one.

PROS
There level looks nice, the eyecandy is OK. There are some secrets, hints and a boss (However I think you should make an arena for the boss fight). I liked the idea of jumping bomb-crates, but it makes no sence as the pit is small enough to allow you jump over the spikes. The same goes for the freezing sandglasses- it was quite unexpected and funny to freeze myself running at a full speed, but it doesn’t have any influence on the difficulty of the gameplay.

CONS
The usage of poles at the beginning of the level is annoying- you have to take an effort to get yourself out of them.
Just two types of enemies not counting Caterpillar…
And just two types of weapons.
Probably the level should be bigger. It’s 256*64 but it doesn’t seem to be big enough cause there is too much of emptiness especilly in the right side of the level. I mean level needs more paths, more platforms, more content…

In my opinion it’s a decent level for a beginner.

Good levels! I enjoyed playing each one of them
Expected more creative bosses tho :)

I’m too lazy to leave a full review, and other users don’t appreciate my reviews.
I’ll just say that I really enjoyed this level, and even though I favor the movement started by Sir Ementaler to create good levels without Plus or Angelscript, this level is an inspiration for all those who do use Angelscript.

Bad:
- to many deadly pits
- boss battle makes on sense
Good:
- everything else. New enemies are fun, and their health is shown above them in a very nice, elegant way. I also enjoyed flying platforms, they look cool, sound cool and are practical. And there are also new weapons, but they are not so great.

This is way too hard man, i doubt that 555 can do it

Greetings from your fellow Mario Maker (and nice reference by naming this Lost Levels)! By first impression, this level felt more like an actual dungeon than the original Castle levels did. The helmuts on belts at the first crate were indeed fun to watch. The gameplay involves the commonly used JJ2 mechanic of finding multiple Trigger Crates to open up your path. And while it’s not original, this level did it pretty well by placing the crates in hazardous spots such as near 3D Spike Bolls, all down in the dungeon where the ambient light gets darker. Ammo is just Bouncers, and they are actually useful down the slopes. The boss is just a regular Tuff Boss, which may be justified if this was part of an episode but on it’s own it’s just your regular bullet sponge. This level is very short but feels professionally made.

I recommend this one for when you have a spare 5 minutes and crave for some quality traditional JJ2 gameplay.

This level felt like a typical first-time experience with JCS. The layout is linear and goes mostly horizontally back and forth. Pickups are grouped into ‘clumps’ too often, you should try placing them more strategically and intuitive. Enemies are just Normal Turtles and some Tuff Turtles, and weapons are just Electro Blaster (with the coin warp near the end offering it’s powerup). All in all very little variety. The first ‘secret’ path using the poles was annoying due to it being hard to escape them, and the blue spring section shouldn’t be forced by sucker tube events. The best thing from this level was the bomb crates on springs thingy, which felt fresh compared to the rest of the level. Lastly is the boss which doesn’t do anything original, being the regular Tuff Boss on horizontal ground.

All in all an okay level as a first timer (believe me, there are far worse) but it will take more effort and especially variety to entertain the single player.

I’m with PurpleJazz when it comes to the sequel. This level is superb IMO. The background is awesome, good enemy, weapon and food placement as well as good music choice. Perfect level, would love to see more!

The level is too simple IMO. There is only one type of weapon and two types of enemies. You could’ve added both flying and normal lizards (they live in deserts, don’t they?) and maybe even dragons (and bats in caves)
There is a lot of room everywhere on the level, except on the boss spot (maybe you wanted it to be that way to make it harder?).

Generally the map needs to be more complex (IMO). This way it’s just too straight forward (go here, shoot this, go there, shoot that)

PS: Too much poles man.

Phew, this took a while to play through even on Normal difficulty, but it was definitely worth it! For this review, I won’t go into detail about every single level as that would be boring, instead I’ll try to remark some positive and negative situations that stood out to me.

This pack contains about 24(?) actual levels divided into 3 episodes and 2 bonus maps accessed solely through a pre-existing savefile, and some more levels acting as cutscenes telling bits of story dialog. Unlike the original JJ1, and just like SWAG, it’s possible to start from the first episode and play through the whole game (just like in JJ2 basically) which makes the pack feel more like a single story.

The first parts of this pack are about identical to earlier versions of Lost Ages (as expected) but then it gets way more wild with custom sprited events including big dragons, robots, and even teddy bears. To answer the question in the download description: yes, I can see Blacky did a lot of experimenting as these levels progressed. Most of it came out positive though, and everything stayed loyal to JJ1’s standards (as in, it never felt like I was playing a different game).

But let’s talk about what’s dreadful about JJ1 and how this pack handles it: the low resolution with poor visibility of your surroundings. Well, luckily most levels are very horizontally oriented which is good, but I’ve had some enounters with enemies walking off from ‘stairs’ or ledges which are only triggered into memory once it’s too late, as well as some enemies falling off ledges (while others don’t and turn around) which can be very tedious and makes you think you (as the player) are being punished for no good. Most notable levels with this flaw are “Hot Rabbit Stew”, “That Tree Level”, and “Mechanical Heart” where some vertical movement is unavoidable to progress.

Leaps of faith, which are another plague on JJ1, are present but little and not too harsh. The level “Dark Dragon Lair” had some, and I had a bad experience near the end of the first bonus map (the dreamlands) where I really didn’t knew what to do for quite a while. A commonly present strategy is placing pickups in a way to mark long jumps, but on that one jump, there was just a circular shape of bouncer ammo’s above a moving platform. It turned out I had to make a long jump to the upper-right where the exit had been hidden from me all along.. Overall, in this pack the platforming happened in tight spaces and relies on skill and memorization rather than luck, while on the memorization part there are some cases where you can fall from ledges into groups of enemies on your first try. Oh well, it’s JJ1 so that’s forgivable and not exclusive to this game.

Also, on multiple occasions larger enemies (as well as moving spikes and spikeball hazards) can appear late in visible memory. I don’t know how JJ1 works exactly and thus can’t explain it that clearly, but imagine running at a mediocre pace and suddenly you get hit by an enemy ‘popping’ in on your position. Again, this is probably just a JJ1 thing, but maybe it could’ve been avoided by more carefully placing the pathways towards large enemies. I don’t know, and at least it doesn’t happen that often.

What I liked most about this pack is how it took ideas from the original JJ1 levels and brought it to a higher level in both depth and difficulty. Moving platforms? They’re there in tons of variations and directions. Backtracking using jumping shoe items? It’s utilized in several levels and done cleverly. Airboard areas? They’re done well on several ocasions (most notably Chernobog). Big bosses? There’s 3 of them and designed more challenging than JJ1’s original flimsy pushovers. But some new ideas are done well too, especially the level “Firewall” where you’re trapped between two laser beams forcing you to progress at a slow but steady pace. It’s also quite generous as the lasers don’t kill you, but simply warp you back without resetting the enemies you defeated earlier. Well, sometimes the level may feel boring and lonely if you tripped and have to do half the level again without shooting, but that’s a luxury issue I guess :P

Aside from the common JJ1 thingies I mentioned earlier, what I disliked most in this pack is that many enemies (mostly the bigger ones) are too sturdy and take too many hits. The original JJ1 had levels with tons of sturdy enemies too, but was often generous with fastfire pickups. In this pack however, fastfire items are quite rare, which made my left thumb tired from all the mashing at times. Yes I could’ve used a repeat key program. But still, I would’ve made some enemies like the dinosaurs and robots less sturdy at least on Normal difficulty.

For bugs, well I’d say these levels are well designed and tested all on your own (good job there!) as it all seems to be in place except for a few things. In “That Tree Level” I could skip part of the level by letting a platform push me through a horizontal wall to the upper checkpoint (I believe it was the 2nd tree where you move back up) right after the part with the 4-hit shield. In the level “Cloud Forest” the music sometimes looped the first part endlessly. In the little ‘thank you’ level at the very end, listening to the catchy disco mix for too long resulted in a crash. And in the 2nd bonus map, picking up the bonus gem and finishing the level results in a crash with ‘File not found: BONUSMAP.053’.

Overall, I felt both surprised and excited about this pack’s release on the last days of 2015, and having played it just confirmed my expectations. It’s not perfect but it’s variety and surprises sure outweight it’s minor flaws. It’s not as balanced as Violet’s SWAG, yet designed somewhat more generous and thoughtful than Mission Spaz. If you never liked JJ1, chances are slim that you will enjoy this pack. And if you haven’t played JJ1 but might consider trying it, I wouldn’t suggest starting here by any chance as the difficulty is definitely more rough. But if you are fond of the original JJ1 and/or SWAG, you are missing out HUGE by not playing this pack. I believe a 9 is a fair number here. No perfection, yet huge fun and challenge with surprises and secrets waiting to be discovered!

The part with the moonwalking Helmuts was hilarious and probably the best reason to download this. It’s a fun oldschool level overall, even if the experience is rather short and easy. I feel it would’ve worked out much better as part of a full episode as originally intended. Nonetheless, cool to see an old level finally get a release!

While this test is competently designed for the most part, one aspect that I do find tiresome is that most of the later levels are much longer than necessary. Most of the jumps are fairly easy, with a few exceptions being more difficult. I’d much prefer it if these levels were shorter due to having fewer easy but repetitive jumps.

One of the most annoying tests I’ve ever played. There’s absolutely nothing fun about pixelhunts, and this test overuses them as a substitute for genuine challenge. On top of things, the flashing lightning in the background becomes irritating fast. Play this only if you’re masochistic and have no qualms about wasting your time.

it says FATAL ERROR
(Rating clearance—do not rate levels you cannot play. Instead, please download the tilesets that you are instructed to download in the level description. That will prevent the error message.)

good but if you find the exit it kill you

I know some effort went into this. It has a lot of levels and a lot of scripts too. Although the level designs are really repetitive and boring. The jj2 gameplay core is lacking here.

I enjoyed playing this test. It has some tricky levels, but not tricky enough to be annoying.