Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Yikes, this map is unplayable. Don’t get me wrong, I encourage the use of JCF and people uploading maps but be honest here, would YOU enjoy playing this in a 2 on 2 CTF map?

I noticed you’ve used some single player events (so you can start it up in SP), but shouldn’t you focus on a balaced CTF map instead of trying to make it SP with some CTF elements.

Anyway, i’ve seen worse maps being uploaded in the years that have been past. But I cannot recommend this map to anyone that wants to play CTF.

It’s not THE worst ever.

This level is the first time in my life that i’ve encountered scripting. This is absolutely amazing, I love what you have done with the weapons and how it behaves. In my opinion this feels much more fair then the traditional hearths system as we know and love from vanilla Jazz.

The eyecandy is flatout simple and doesn’t realy stand out in any way, this however has more to do with the limited tileset then with the creator. The level design is fine for the script the level uses. It makes the level so much more fun.

I absolutely recommend downloading this level and give it a spin. It is so much fun.

Note to author, please make more levels with this script. I just adore it!

I deliberately chose not to download this when I first saw it, knowing how newcomers tend to upload the most awful of things they believe are remixes. Ninja’s recommendation made me change my mind and I have to say I would have missed out if I didn’t, because this piece is altogether incredible. Hoping to hear more from this artist in the future.

dude… this is so sick.

Incredibly fun level with a simple yet well designed layout that encourages tactical play. I especially like the overall utility of both RF and EB here. This is one of the best levels for 2vs2s/3vs3s at the moment, so downloading is thoroughly recommended.

foly’s review summed up the level quite nicely. however given the obviously biased rating that this level has been given i feel the need to downrate this a bit. seriously overrated

Not a bad first level overall, however it is far too open, lacks ammo and is generally quite bland in the visual department.

This is actually nice, even though it’s just a recolor of the medivo tileset, as Jelly said, some of them present Medivo in a completely different view.

This game is such a wonder.

This and Martin’s Carrotus map have always been personal favorites of mine. The sheer mayhem on this map (I recommend around 5+ players) is amazing. I love the placement of weapons. It forces players to carefully manage ammo consumption. Powerups are scarce and this allows players to take more hits and make games last a bit longer.

The eye candy is fantastic, something F!re always received most criticism for. He obviously took the advice to heart and made sure everything looks nice and polished, which can be quite difficult with this tileset.

The excellent music track pushes the score further up, giving this level a big fat stamp of approval.

This review has been long overdue. But since I’m turning 30 in a couple of hours, my childhood, teenage and college memories were flashing before my eyes.

The joyful memories of playing these amazing, handcrafted and stunning levels for the first time oh so many years ago was amongst them. After installing Jazz2 again (and a few shots) I decided to replay these majestic levels.

The layout is simply amazing and a joy to play. It plays fluid and has an excellent difficulty level; Something I find to be horribly overlooked in most people’s attempts. SPLASH establishes himself as a solid designer with an eye for the creative, slightly offbeat designs. Placements are excellent, sound and thematically fitting. I love the use of the masts in the beach level.

Hero4Hire is one of my favorite levelpacks and one of SPLASH’s best from the day. It deserves this 9 through and through.These highly prolific levels are the epitome of creativity and turning the meta of using these tilesets upside down. The Beatles made Sergeant Pepper. SPLASH made Hero4Hire.

There are no obvious grammar errors here. Couldn’t probably translate anything better myself. The only bad thing I have found is that the team color names are too long for the HUD and thus parts of the team scores are covered by the flags. Abbreviations could have worked there, but I however expect the HUD to be a little different in JJ2+ 5.0.

nice program

EDIT 30th April 2020 – Ok well in my original review I gave an 8.5 and later stated that it’s worth a 10 apparently, which makes me wonder why didn’t I just rate it 10 straight away no matter what people think, but whatever. Though honestly I still don’t think that I’m far off from the truth.

However, times have changed and in the meantime we got absolutely amazing new scripted test levels such as The Mighty Switchtest series, and a whole lot more which are sadly not on J2O. The tests I mentioned kinda upped the standards for this gamemode in my opinion. This is why I’m going to lower my rating by just a little bit, as I still think there’s a lot of good things in this test – the difficulty curve is definitely spot on. It starts easy and slowly begins to be harder with each new level. The 50 and 100 milestones are probably the best examples. However I am not a fan of walljumps and pixel hunts as those are just too random (yes I know I made a test which revolves around pixel hunts). It’s enjoyable though and there are still people who are willing to take the 150 level challenge. Would definitely recommend this test to anyone, it’s pretty fun for the most part, though it starts being hard after the first 100 levels. Actually passing it is recommended only for pro players who are willing to spend time on it, but if you just like playing tests casually, passing the first 100 is good enough of an acomplishment.

Overview

Vault of Ceramicus is a tall level that takes a while to traverse around upwards. It’s cramped in a few areas, with lots of tubes. There’s a coin warp reward near the top, and a room at the bottom with lots of gems, that you can reach with TNT and a flying carrot.

Pros

Props for thinking outside of the box. I think levelmakers should experiment with treasure more, as there’s so much hidden potential.

It looks alright, for the most part.

Cons

Slaz failed at making this level work for a smaller party, which was apparently his goal. I can confirm this by playtesting it a couple of times. I don’t think he realised it’s not about forcefully slowing players down, but mainly the size of the map. Even the recommended maxscore isn’t so great. At 5-6 players with 100 as the goal, whoever reaches the gem vault first will automatically win. Which brings me to this point;

Going for the gem vault is worth way more, than aiming for the coin warp. Not only does it take less time, but is a much larger reward. In other words, the rewards are completely imbalanced.

The gem vault isn’t that hard/risky to reach. It may take a few tries and require knowledge of the flying through tubes (press down through a tube while you’re using a flying carrot) and large TNT hitbox trick. But the reward is so high and most players aren’t going to stay at the bottom area, since there isn’t much reason to (small amount of gems and no useful ammo), further reducing the risk. Not to mention the reward is so high, that any gems you may lose from getting shot are miniscule in comparison.

To put it shortly, I think the vault reward is too high. Everytime I or someone else manages to reach to vault, the winner has pretty much been decided at that point. And at that point it becomes less treasure hunt, and more level and mechanic knowledge to win (also, whoever reaches that point first).

The coin warp becomes useless once all the gems are collected in the room. I think a respawning tube of gems would’ve been better, as they would always give the coins a purpose.

The nature of the layout (highly vertical and forcefully slowing players down) makes it difficult to catch up to others, or hit them. Useful ammo is a little lacking, too. As a result, the pace of the map slows down.

A lot of areas look the same, especially the middle area. Part of the reason is the vast amount of tubes sticking out there. When you’re falling down, it’s not easy to see which tube direction goes to where. I think it may have been more intuitive to have the tubes sticking out from where you can enter from, which is far easier/quicker than trying to read small arrows.

Conclusion

Overall, I think this level is okay, but with notable flaws when you play it for a while. It may work better with a larg(er) amount of players.

This level is easily recognizable as made by FireSword: lavish eyecandy, heavy on the conceptual side and with some interesting scripted effects. I found that it played fairly well, with a lot of fighting occuring in the lower corridors. On the one hand this was great, but due to the flatness of the level’s bottom area it was also easy for everyone to just run back and forth shooting with their blaster with no one really getting the chance to grab the dropped gems because everyone was constantly blinking.

There’s plenty of room to move around the rest of the level though, so if the fighting at the bottom gets too intense it’s always possible to roam around looking for potshots and gems people haven’t taken yet. There’s a fair amount of gems in the level and there’s a lot of useful ammo in the upper parts of the level as well which keeps things dynamic. The ammo selection is standard but seekers are relatively sparse but also really useful in the vertical parts of the level which makes them all the more desirable.

The level-ending warp is through a scripted portal in the middle of the level that looks rather spectacular, and puts you in a separate area where not much happens if you don’t have enough gems – in which case you just jump down back into the fight. The portal looks great and somehow even attracts players when they don’t have enough gems. The rest of the level is heavily decorated as well and makes ample use of Castle’s slides, which didn’t look that great, in my opinion; a matter of taste maybe, but I didn’t care much for it. There’s a couple of other areas which looked like tilebugs but might have been meant to look like that, knowing FireSword’s style. I guess I prefer a less experimental style.

Finally, the secret mentioned in the description involves walljumping for a bonus of 100 gems. I think it’s a really bad idea, games where people know of the secret will become “who will get there first” races instead of actual treasure hunts. Secrets are cool, but this one is a bit too big.

It’s things like that – the imbalanced secret, the somewhat-too-avant-garde eyecandy – that don’t really endear me to the level. It’s not bad by any means and will make for good games – and it has that spectacular portal – but there are better levels out there, and in this contest.

Great level, probably my favourite out of all contest entries.

There’s very little to criticize. The level is small and contains a good amount of gems and quite a bit of ammo too, which makes for action-packed games. There’s a clear division between the upper and lower half of the level, with the lower half seeing most of the action when I played it – this of course in part because it’s hard to dodge shots in water, and also because there’s a good amount of gems and ammo to be found.

The top of the level is easy to navigate and contains several pinball paddles which makes it possible to jump huge distances and be very mobile in general. If you’ve got about 6 players (as recommended by the author) games in this level become chaotic, full of action and a lot of fun.

The level looks great, too. Especially the upper half is well-decorated, with the eyecandy never going overboard but still making everything look great. The music fits the tileset and feel of the level really well and is a good choice here. My only criticism on this part would be that the bottom (underwater) area looks comparatively dull. This creates a good contrast between the upper and lower half, but some more decoration would perhaps have been nice.

Overall this is an excellent level that’s among the best Treasure levels out there and I’d certainly recommend hosting it whenever you’re running the game mode on your server.

AngelScript! Woo!

This level is huge, open, and without much of a flow – that is, there’s no obvious paths to take. You kind of just run around and jump from platform to platform (which is hell if you aren’t Spaz, by the way) and hope you bump into gems or other players. Complicating things is the pit at the bottom of the level, which luckily has a big gem-saving script attached to it (I wonder why you didn’t just use warps) so you don’t lose your gems upon dying.

Gems that fall down or towards the level’s side edges because people get shot will still be lost however, which is a major problem as the game goes on and may eventually make the game unwinnable. This is a serious problem that really should’ve been fixed.

Another scripted feature of the level is your blaster, which has only 25 bullets and needs reloading when these are depleted. Reloading requires standing still and waiting while your ammo count slowly increases. This is a nice idea that could work really well in treasure hunt (where you really don’t want to stand still). However 25 bullets is perhaps a bit too few and the short range of the blaster means that it becomes really hard to actually hit other people before you run out of bullets. It’s also impossible to reload while your ammo count is above zero. This often makes it smarter to just jump in the pit and get free bullets rather than waiting for the reload to finish.

Overall an okay-ish level with some innovative ideas, but it really could’ve used some more testing and thinking about the gameplay impact of the scripted features. A shame they weren’t implemented better, or this could’ve been a really interesting level.

I played this online today. It’s a nice level, but it’s so big! You’d need a lot of players to make this play well, as we were with about 6 people and I often went for minutes at a time without really interacting with other players.

The level looks really nice, though it’s a bit “bumpy” in its design – you don’t necessarily get stuck, but you’ll be jumping rather than running most of the time. This is of course in part due to the level’s vertical layout. On the one hand the many obstacles and the vertical gameplay make it hard to get away from others, on the other hand they also make it hard to actually shoot someone. The inclusion of TNT is a nice touch that has the opportunity to mitigate this.

As for the gems, I think the amount is just about right for the gem limit of 150 or more we played with. Things tended to get a bit eventless in the later stages of the game as most gems were gone from the level and people were hard to find due to the level’s size, but that might be different with larger numbers of players.

All in all a good level, but it’s kind of stuck in the “big JDC event levels” niche. Taking on a level of this size is commendable, but for casual treasure servers a smaller level would probably work better.