[Open Assets] Electric Circuit Zone 1.0

A very challenging race, but once you get the hang of Ellie's playstyle, you'll be able to get it down pretty easy!

way too much negativity here, this is great. i was expecting a crime against humanity. seems like the bad reviews are from people mad cause they can't play Sparks well, or just rude in general. this map is great for Sparks, everything is nominal. honestly haven't had any problems

no one told me holding spin makes the twirl jump go higher it took me 13 minutes to figure that out

Hey, after playing through this a few times and learning what to do, it's actually pretty alright. Once I know what to do and how to do it, it's a pretty exhilarating ride.

There are a few issues though.
1. It is not telegraphed whatsoever that you have to HOLD JUMP while doing Spark's air twirl jump-boost maneuver, not doing so gimps your jump no matter how long you hold spin for.

2. You HAVE to stop at that final checkpoint. There's no way around it, if you don't, you die, but it's all too easy to miss it, fly over it, and then fall into a pit.

3. Those Bio Satellite-esque lasers go too fast and too close to the entrance, it's all too easy to completely lose your flow just because you got an unlucky laser cucking you out of your dash mode right at the entrance. Other than that it's a fun obstacle to avoid, though. You should definitely play Bio Satellite from Kimokawaiii to see a way to make that same obstacle have a more fair entrance to that sort of obstacle, as doing something like that will make this a lot less frustrating to play.

4. What even is this place? None of these structures have any sense of believable structure or any context as too why its obstacles or setpieces are there. It looks very disjointed.

Overall though, I've gotten my time for all 4 laps down to approximately 3 1/2 minutes, which is good. It's fun once you learn what to do, although that definitely took longer than it should've @_@. It's a very unique playstyle though, and I think seeing a more polished map like this would be great! Hell, you could probably update this one over time and make it more memorable and fair as well.

This map took me 8 minutes and 21 seconds to finish one lap.
This is a problem.

There's a lot I could say here. There's major issues like the completely unintuitive jump, which I attempted with electric charge, made once after 5 solid minutes of trying, and could never get it to work again. There's the fact that only yellow lasers give you charge, *not* red. There's the consistent tiling issues and lack of detail placed all over the map.

Issues like these just make it *not fun* to play, but it really boils down to this:

Why is this a Circuit map? Circuit maps, by design, are simple. Also, only allowing one character kind of removes half the point of Circuit in the first place.

I honestly think this should have been an SP map. That way, you can place little signs explaining advanced tech for your character, do more with the concept without having laps be excessively long, and just add more polish in general.

obviously this is a fine and functional stage, it doesn't have any errors, it looks nice to some degree, and clearly you gave some semblance of a damn about its design.

what i hate about the stage is how poor that design is. it sure is a sparks stage, i'll give it that, but it is *ungodly* strict and unforgiving. you may have the boost from the new linedef action, but either i'm just extremely bad at your character, or there isn't a real substantial boost at all. i played the stage twice and cleared the first huge obstacle without the boost, but couldn't do it with it. you really should design for the eventuality that most players aren't amazing at the game and will get stuck at some segments. some parts of the map (such as the green wireframe wall obstacle) are made outright impossible.

i really didn't enjoy any parts of the stage, i may not be the sparks enthusiast that you want to be playing your stage, but i don't think i would've enjoyed it any more.

Welcome to releases. Without reading Spark's page, this map is... really unintuitive.