Well, after about 45 minutes and lots of running and jumping, I think it's safe to form an opinion about this pack. I liked it!
I can see where the criticisms are coming from. After getting through Terrance Mountain (did you mean Terrace Mountain?), I realized that my brain had fogged over a little bit, and that the level was basically the same as the previous ones but with the assets swapped out. That was the overarching problem with the pack, at least the part I played, as a whole: each level feels a bit samey. The rooms and hallways wind around the XY-plane seemingly at random, and there's a repetitive rhythm of outdoor-room>cave>outdoor-room>cave that is impossible not to pick up on, even subconsciously. To make matters worse, any given outdoor-room and cave even has roughly the same height and width as the other outdoor-rooms and caves elsewhere in the level and elsewhere in the pack. This, and your tendency to stretch the levels a minute or two longer than they need to be, is the recipe for fatigue.
And yet, I found myself enjoying the pack a fair bit! Quite a bit more than I expected, from some of the criticisms I'd heard. I think some of the problem (for the player) lies in playing too much of it at once. If you stack all that level information in your head in one session, the formulaic qualities make themselves more apparent. But if you take your time with the pack, only playing one or two zones at a time, you can appreciate the levels much more easily. Is this still a problem with the pack? Absolutely. But I think you've been given a bit more crap than you deserve.
There's actually a good amount of beautiful scenery and solid level design on display here. I rarely felt cramped or slowed down, and each area had a consistent level of detail put into it, which is something you tend not to see in ginormous packs like this. It showed that you really cared about what you were making. The consistent pretty visuals are even more impressive considering how much freaking content there is in this mod. And I rarely got turned around or lost, though sometimes I had to use a little extra brainpower to find the way forward, which wouldn't be necessary if you used some more rings to telegraph where the player should go. Again, I'm pretty astounded by how many acres of level you managed to put in front of the player, and how consistent it is in visual quality and playability. You deserve a big round of applause if only for that.
Here are my personal suggestions for improvement:
- I wish you'd use slopes in the gameplay a lot more. They're there in the levels but mostly as an afterthought. I rarely felt like the slopes were anything more than a smoothed-out stair case. As far as I'd gotten, the lava level, there weren't any fun hills to roll down or big ramps to shoot off of, which is a shame considering how much your design style seems to emphasize speed.
- You should vary your level lengths a lot more. With few exceptions, I was hitting the 4-5 minute mark on every single level. This got meta-repetitive. Here's a Gary Provost quote about writing and sentence length that I think is relevant:
This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.
- You didn't HAVE TO represent every classic level theme. Hell, you don't HAVE TO make three acts for every zone. Playing through the levels, I sometimes got the feeling that you'd run out of steam by Act 3, sometimes by Act 2, and sometimes that the whole Zone was made with you just going through the motions. Maybe this is because you felt like you HAD TO make a level of a particular theme in order to check a box in your head, or to fulfill an idea you had a while ago. But the Parade of Obligatory Themes gets really old unless you have a unique idea for each of them. I say, if you don't have an engaging idea for a level, one that fills you with energy as you put the pieces together, then screw it! You don't have to make it!
Overall I think you've made something special and deserve some more praise for all your hard work. If this pack had come out during the Final Demo era, or even the early 2.0 era, it would've been a hit. It probably IS a hit on the master server. See, I think there's a time when quantity is better than quality, and it's for all those kids online who have endless time to blast through level after level with their friends. I think you've provided them with an excellent levelpack to do just that.