a quick overview of my experience with each boss:
all of these arenas are way too small, the movement and camera suffer greatly from this
gfz - why is there acid? this doesn't feel like it's in greenflower anymore
thz - the shock floor is a neat idea, but there's too much of it, and it should be the same color as the floors we find in thz2. more importantly however, it completely invalidates egg slimer, whose main goal is to drench the floor into a hazard himself.
dsz - too many holes, the holes on the edge are way to close to the wall. also, why are the walls made out of glass and the water a different texture than normal? again, doesn't feel like it's dsz anymore.
cez - a fine idea on pencil and paper, but in practice it suffers. turrets loud, eggman is absolutely no challenge once the barrier is gone, and it's suuuuper easy to just damage boost through the turrets guarding the buttons. oh, and again - why is there acid? doesn't feel like cez anymore.
acz - for a mod that promises "salt edits," fang sure is a lot easier. less areas for him to bounce, the arena looks like he invited me to his house instead of a surprise fight on a train, and the friendly cyan carpet goes completely against the wild west theme of arid canyon.
bcz - i know i said i'd only do a 'quick overview' but there's so much going on here. it's the only arena that's not too small, and it ends up suffering from it- you have more room to dodge his shots, when you go to hit metal and he phases through your attack his line becomes too predictable, and you have to wait longer when he charges at you. and on that topic, the sloped corners make it so that you can literally just stand in one place and metal will never hit you while charging. the theme is indeed space but instead of being on a magic ring asteroid, i'm in complete outer space- again, doesn't feel like i'm in bcz anymore
the pipe towers zone replacement was a neat reference, but 1-1, while iconic, is way to short and simple to be enjoyable in a sonic game as a standalone level. it just doesn't transition well. the increased jump power was a really nice touch, but i only got to experience it for 20 seconds. i would have loved to see some new level design based around this bigger jump, whether it's based in 2d or if it transitioned to 3d.
now let's talk mp bonus stages. these were way to small and the difficulty curve was too sharp for all the wrong reasons. let's talk spheres. having to collect. every. single. sphere. absolutely kills the momentum. think about it - i'm collecting spheres in a straight line, and whoops! i accidentally move a bit to the right, missing a few. now i have to stop moving, put the spheres in front of me (which is usually a lot) on hold, and go back for a few measly spheres that i missed. the way to remedy this is to add more spheres in different patterns. the levels feel uninspired, i could make a list of things like i did with the bosses but tl;dr they're too small, some of the gimmicks inside are weird or unrelated to the theme, and there's way too little time. time constraints are meant to stress the player out because they messed up or they were reasonably slow. if the player is reasonably fast with the level, they should be rewarded (with the serotonin that (hopefully) fills their body), not put under stress with a strict time limit
but for all the mistakes here, it was still neat to see and play through these creative ideas. i hope what i've said here gave you better ways to implement them into any levels you might make
Check the List of Edited Maps below. Some Bolded Outlined maps requires Software Mode so you can see the Portals.
