This pack contain good quality levels. Delta Halo is my favorite, anyway, download recommended.
‘looking forward to episode 2’ is what I said in my review of Episode 1, and here it is! This time I played through the episode in one sitting unlike episode 1, in which I took a break due to a certain level..
Episode 2 starts with a similar text scroll telling the player what happened previously. After that the first level begins, a dark place where you’re put right into the action. The level feels slightly maze-like and puts a dark, dramatic atmosphere to the story and scenery. The gameplay felt like basic run & gun style, and other than some minor searching the level design felt easy-going. There is pretty much food placement and in this level, due to the story, the ammo pickups are packed in a stash along the way.
The 2nd level feels comfortable to any old school Jazzer and it keeps true to Medivo standards. There are chain balls which you can use as platforms and lots of spike pits. Yes, these are true deathpits (plus required hehe) and that’s the only thing I personally didn’t like about the level. It took a while for me to learn which chain ball platforms had pits below them, it made this level took most of my lives. Other than that, the level is very forgiving and ammo is well spread over the place. There are some carrots, but not many (same as episode 1).
The first boss fight (with cool music) was well done, just not very original. Of course, many things have already been done with the Bilsy boss but I’ve never fought him in such a dark and fitting atmosphere before. Again nothing really new, yet still a surprising and refreshing bossfight.
The dark atmosphere continues to grow in the next levels. Some levels will feel familiar if you’ve played episode 1. Thanks to that I got through them pretty fast, even though enemies were less forgiving now and they’re hiding in the foreground and darkness again (an aspect that made some parts of episode 1 somewhat hard). One time I got stuck inside a rock (rock event) that was apparently there to block a path, but seeing it made me think I could jump it..
After some more story-based levels I got to a Swamp level. This tileset has been used often (Agama’s) yet Laro came with some nice level design here. The lower area is a constant row of trees and thick growth while the upperside has more bushes and high trees, much like the real amazon rainforest. This level has easier enemies than the previous and it gave me more urge to explore due to many gems and passages. Unlike it’s name of ‘Iron Mountains’, it felt more like a true rainforest!
Then there was what I think is the most interesting level in the pack, a bossfight against Rocket Turtle. He follows a belt-path all the way to the end of the level and your goal is to defeat him before reaching it. Luckely, a warp at the end gives you the ability to retry after a failed attempt. I learned the level design after 3 attempts (yes I think I sucked) and used tricks such as planning a path around him, waiting for him to come towards me while shooting rockets, freezing him, and more. The level is well designed around finding strategies to defeat him quicker. I know much more has been done with the Rocket Turtle boss, but this is now my favorite fight against him!
After more story (it’s still of some interest, yes), you get in a level with a snowy blizzard where you’ll need to find your way. Due to the lack of pickups and enemies along the way I thought the level itself was the worst of the pack. But since it’s part of the story I can live with that. The rabbits stuck in the snow (and their names) were kinda funny, too.
Then at last there’s another story-based level at a snowy base. The rabbits talk to you and the ‘Commander’ will eventually have a ‘mission’ for you. But for that, we’d have to wait for episode 3. Yes, the ending came very sudden again. There’s no real action in the end, making this pack itself feel slightly less complete than episode 1 was..
Overall I really enjoyed it. And I think Laro has made better decisions in both gameplay and level design. There is less annoyance, more forgiving enemies, and I personally found it easier than the previous episode (on medium difficulty). Likely due to the fact that I can’t handle respawning enemies. :D
Download recommended, but I highly suggest you to play episode 1 first! And an 8.2 (especially) for the improved level design!
What Ron said, mostly.
However, some minor notes, I got stuck sometimes, I didn’t trust the Jungle level after the Castle level, which ended up in me using JJfly most of the time.
DR recommended, but that’s partly because of a lack of good single player episodes recently.
Edit: Secret area’s and a coinwarp added. Upped the rating a bit.
King re-uploaded the level with minor yet better changes. Good eyecandy, good music choice, solid gameplay, keep JCSing and you will definitely get better. ;)
Its pretty good, story is original, but it fits the levels, enemies are placed well, i didnt really like eyecandy in some levels but it was alright in most of them.There were few bugs (i got stuck a few times and such) but nothing serious. Overall i liked these levels, best one is definetly dark castle.
Cold Flash is a nice level with the classic Diamondus tileset in ice cold style.
Eyecandy is used generally well, especially at Layer 6, 7, and 8, but I felt there was some missing, like diamonds in the wall. But then again, the rest of the eyecandy is good. The music fits too.
The gameplay was solid. Some enemies were too easy to kill and others were harder to kill. The items were placed well, but there were too much seekers which made the level and, thus, the boss fight rather easier. Speaking of the boss fight, I think the Full C made it too easy, still a nice a boss though.
Download recommended?
A good classical made single player level. If you are looking for turtle massacre, definitely worth to check out.
A good pack, though I liked the first episode more. I liked the level layouts, they were quite good. The shuttle level was awesome, good idea! Ammo placement is fine, the story is original though I don’t really like it that much. Also, you should get the spelling errors fixed.
This pack deserves a 7.5, but I’m willing to raise it to 7.7 thanks to some stuff I liked in here. Keep up the good work and fix the spelling! DL rec.
EDIT: Raised to 7.8 because some stuff was fixed.
@Myles,
With practice comes perfection.
Look at my early levels. Heck, look at ANYBODY’S early levels. Nobody starts out with Featured Download material. They have to work at it in order to improve.
Don’t give up. Just keep hackin’ at it.
Others will probably enjoy more than me, overall I felt it was okay. While it tried to be unique in some places, it didn’t make much of a difference to the gameplay overall. My favourite level was The Dark Castle which has a lot of paths to traverse. Maybe a little too much dialogue at times esp. towards end, but I don’t follow the plot much.
Actually a really nice set to roam around in. Very clean, very slick. The only thing I could find real fault with it is that it can be hard to know what is masked and what isn’t with inconsistent use of letters.
I’d like those music notes from Scription v1 back, please.
Not too bad of a level. It has some creative eyecandy (Although I didn’t like the way the “beasts” were handled), decent enough flow, and a good amount of ammo. Worth a download, I guess.
This was a pretty good pack.
The Lost World Episode by Ninja Dodo was a little hard to get used to at first. I mean, admit it. It had decent, but not overly great eyecandy. Most of the music was animal noises and crashing waves (and stuff like that). The story wasn’t very original (unless you’ve either never seen Jurassic Park, or else never heard of it). The tilesets weren’t the greatest in the world. The levels were pretty simple to beat.
Stopping between levels to watch cutscenes was also rather irritating (Although I applaud the creative and successful use of the technology).
However, for some strange reason, I found myself drawn to playing LWE. Why? I couldn’t tell you. It was just fun.
Nothing was overly spectacular…but then again, it worked well enough to make the pack enjoyable. It wasn’t the most original singleplayer episode out there, but it was decently well executed.
Maybe it was the mood. Despite the aforementioned so-so tilesets and average music, it made up for a lot of shortcomings, since it was actually not bad.
What should this episode be rated? Probably in the 7.5-8 range. I refuse to overrate it just because it has actual video cutscenes (which I actually think detracts from the story, since it slows it down) which tell a story simple enough to be explained in text strings, or at the very least with a “text and/or picture tileset”.
Nonetheless, it’s a solid pack, and it’s worth a download.
I just wanted to mention I finished this level as Spaz without much trouble and I didn’t even have to wall jump. The only impossible obstacle on my way was the stupid box you put Spaz start in – after removing it the level is perfectly possible though. I’m able to repeat and record it if there’s a need to, but I hope my word about whether a jj2 level is beatable or not became trustworthy enough by now.
Sorry for saying it so late, I actually did it a day after you uploaded this level but then I suddenly forgot about it.
What an idea! I would never except that it looks fine! It needs event generated things however because it would look dull.
[edit: DR]
Not bad, but still could be better. Eyecandy is good enough, but there are bugs around 51, 59. Gameplay is a bit messy, but still, good job on your first level!
Give you levels to people to test them before you upload something like this…
Played this today and its quite nice.
Eyecandy:
I like it a lot, there’s been quite an effort put in eyecandy. The level looks rather beautiful. There were few tilebugs found but hardly noticeable and it doesent really look ugly either. Background really looks amazing. I think there was a lot of effort used for it. The enemies in walls looks rather good too, i liked it, but more on that below. Nothing much to say here actually, the level looks fantastic.
9/10
Gameplay:
Quite good. The trigger part at the start is quite nice. It did get me lost for some time but it was my fault for not looking at the arrows. However monsters were really easy to beat. Dragonflies and Fish were more or less the only ones that could hurt me. There were some spikes in the water that i thought could hurt me but when i fell on them it didnt. Nothing much to say here either.
8/10
Enemy placement:
Well as i said enemies were rather easy to beat for me. Perhaps the reason for it is because i was able to shoot most of the enemies standing 1 tile above instead of coming down, and the other part was cuz i have just recently played blacky’s map which was quite hard. Enemies here are placed okay just some were easy to pass due to 1 tile height advantage. Boss in the water was a very good idea, and few turtles placed along with him was really good too. But adding seekers AND a full carrot made it rather too easy for me, i didnt even need the carrot since i lost only 1h. Still i very much like the idea .
7.5/10
Pickups:
Very good. I didnt quite understand what do i need RF for, used it once to RF climb into a secret area with blue gems but later i found out that it was connected to the lower passage. You even added a RF pu. I like the idea of putting toaster boxes in a “cold” lvl. Seekers came rather handy against dragon flies and Fishes. i managed to get 1 sugar rush which was okay i guess, i didnt really need it thou. I found most of the secret areas and they are very well placed it really made shoot some walls and explore the whole lvl. there were some monsters in the walls which i thought were also secret areas and i spent so much time looking for secret passages, then i gave up and thought “il just check in jcs” when i saw it was just eyecandy the first thing that crossed my mind was “FUUUUU”. Anyways pickups are very well placed, secret areas were very well hidden, i think i found most of them.
8/10
Music:
It’s quite nice. I think i might use it for some lvls i create. It didnt have any boring parts and it can really set up the mood for the level.
8.5/10
Overall Rating: 8.2
Download recommendation?
Yes. The level doesn’t really have any kind of a story, but it is really fun to play. I would definitely recommend it.
Thanks, Blacky. Thanks so much. Makes it awful hard to write a decent review when you point out almost everything I was going to say… =(
Oh, well. Guess I’ll try and point out some unique things (If that’s even gonna be possible here), since my fellow reviewer’s already covered most of the basics.
Like Blackraptor said, there are some upsides and some downsides to Carrotus Lake. The layout is small, but not too much so. The level isn’t 100% symmetric, but there’s enough similarities between each half to avoid giving one player an unfair terrain advantage. Powerups did seem a bit excessive, but I think only one PU really needs to be taken out (The seeker powerup, obviously).
One thing that I DID notice that I don’t think Blacky pointed out was that two out of the three powerups were over on the right side of the map, which means that the Blue team can get them much quicker than the Red team. There’s a few tall platforms in the middle of the map (Particularly one with a one-tile hole in it) that might be better places to stash stuff, although the limited size of CL does make this pretty gnarly.
I liked how the base positions were inverted, with the Blue base on the far right side of the map where 9 out of 10 JCSers would put the red one. Changed things up a little.
I didn’t download the music, so I won’t include it in my rating.
Eyecandy was standardized, but decent enough. No real gripes here.
Ammo was distributed well, as were the carrots (although, as somebody else already pointed out, it’s pretty easy to camp the upper left zone).
In the end, I think this is a solid level that’s good for a 3-4 person match (Dang you, Blackraptor, for stealing my thunder once again!), and it’s worth a download.
This is a pretty nice looking map small enough to be used for duels or 2vs2 matches. I actually played it with more people than this map is probably built for, but the size would accommodate at least 3 other players before it starts getting too crowded. The eyecandy is pretty standard for this tileset, but looks nice, so no real complaints there. Maybe I would’ve connected some of the floating pumpkins to some vines. The background is what looks like some mountains behind a lake, which gives the level its name.
There’s not much to be said about the layout. The bases are on opposite diagonals from each other, and the blue base is considerably more open. The red base is tucked away in a corner below a long narrow drop. It’s possible to escape upwards by RF climbing, but its not reccomended because of the lenght of the drop and the size of the map. My opponent shot me in the face as soon as I managed to get up :( I don’t like the spot around 19,30 too much since I kept running into it when trying to reach the base and it would bounce me up over it. The center of the map is fairly open so expect lots of confrontations to take place there. There are 3 powerups used here, which is a bit excessive, and especially the seeker powerup makes things really chaotic. Personally I think this could’ve gotten away with only needing 1 powerup, its small and they arent far away from one another. The ammo is placed in basic patterns but its balanced out well and there’s enough of it.
There’s two carrots in this, one full energy at the center of the map and a +1 in the top left corner. I have no problems with this and its good that there is more than a full energy that people just camp. With the abundance of 2h-dealing weaponry the extra carrot doesnt seem excessive at all.
Overall, this is a pretty nice level. It reminds me of a shrunken version of Martins Carrotus Squash (I think I spelt that right? I dont remember :<) It’s good for small matches but doesn’t hold a large amount of people. There also isnt really any innovation in it, and this makes it hard for the map to stand out against dozens of other decent carrotus levels. However, it’s not a bad effort at all, and I had fun playing it. Download reccomended.
-br
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