Jazz Jackrabbit 2

The Good
I really enjoyed playing this game. It contains many different locations and enemies, like first "Jazz Jackrabbit". There are also the same weapons, but Epic added some new ones, such as freezer, heat-seeker and pepper spray. But it's good to conserve ammo for bosses, and killing regular enemies with blaster. Blaster has once again unlimited ammo.

Game is much easier than it's prequel. There aren't insanely hard levels like Orbitus from "Jazz 1". But fights with bosses can be a real pain in a butt (especially queen, bolly boss and Devan himself, while other are fairly easy, like tuf turtle boss and robot).

You can select two completely different characters to play: Jazz or Spaz. Jazz, for example, use his "ear-copter", while Spaz can smash enemies by his feet.

Graphically it looks good, even today. Everything looks like taken from cartoon movie. "Jazz 2" also introduces more complicated backgrounds than "Jazz 1". I really enjoyed "psycho" and "jungle" levels design. Sound effects are brilliant. Music is like from first "Jazz" but in much better quality.

"Jazz 2" also contains multiplayer! You can play on split-screen, through LAN or Internet. Multi has five types of gameplay: cooperative (you're playing the same levels like in single player, but with friends), deathmatch, race (you've got to run through level several times), treasure hunt (collect 100 diamonds and run to the exit) and capture the flag (yes, CTF in platform game!). When you buy this game, you also get "Jazz Creation Station" (abbreviated to "JCS"), which let you create your own levels!

The Bad
When you want to play "Jazz 2" by LAN or Intenet, you can't play race and cooperative. I completely don't know why they aren't included.

Maximal screen size is 640x480. That's odd - other games released in 1998 had much bigger screen size. One episode contain levels based on three first planets from "Jazz 1": Diamondus, Tubelectric and Medivo. Designers were run out of ideas?

And the worst thing are walls - you can sometimes jump into walls and get stuck. You can see it in the end of "castle" levels, when you defeat queen. While in original episodes it only appears in this level, in some user-made levels it appears very often, especially in levels converted from "Jazz 1", which had many narrow tunnels, like in Diamondus.

The Bottom Line
Well, "the good" section is much longer than this "bad" section. Despite these bad things, you will probably enjoy this game. I always keep this game for parties - simple rules and split screen for max. 4 players make this game perfect for such things.