Haunted Heights Zone - 8/10
Well, this is pretty fantastic. The only big complaint I have is how linear it is. I have been playing this level pretty obsessively ever since you started handing out betas on #srb2fun, and after a while the lack of a major non-character-specific path split does start to make itself noticed. The mini-split after the first room is so inconsequential that it might as well not exist. The stacked paths in the room after the factory are nice, although the lower path isn't easily visible from the entrance, so it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of players don't even notice it. Your map is very fun, but barring character choice, it's pretty much the same experience every time you play it.
Another thing that contributes to this is your approach to exploration and placing power-ups: You rarely actually hide stuff. Almost all of the power-up monitors are in plain sight from the main path and require tricky platforming and/or clever thinking to get to. Not that that's bad, quite the opposite! I love it when people place items like that, but it shouldn't come at the total expense of hiding items in places the player won't even come across without actively exploring. SRB2 is a game that heavily encourages and rewards exploration, and any custom level that doesn't abide by that will feel like it's missing something.
Moving on to more specific issues:
- I didn't like how long and tedious the way back up was if you fell down at the first set of vertically moving conveyor belts. They're a moderately difficult challenge that a lot of players will probably mess up a few times, and around the fourth or fifth time it starts to get annoying that you have to climb up all those stairs just to get another try. You should probably put a spring below the conveyors instead.
- The disappearing platform rooms had a similar problem. While it was a very wise decision to have the pits teleport the player instead of kill them, I really think they should teleport you to the last safe spot, not the very beginning of the section.
- Speaking of the disappearing platform sections, the hole in the ceiling that you are teleported out of in the first of these is so close to the edge of the pit that if you're pressing forward, you'll fall right back in. Might wanna move it back a bit.
- I thought the spikeball "crushers" were a very neat idea, but apart from the one that guards a monitor, you didn't really use them in particularly interesting ways. The ones that were placed in a row didn't really work because the gaps between them were so large that you could just walk through unthreatened. I think if you placed them closer together, it could actually make for a really interesting gimmick.
- The factory section felt a bit sparse and unfinished. The room with the slime "jets" in particular was pretty much just an empty square.
- The teleport at the end of Knuckles' path could have been obscured better. In fact, I wonder why you used a teleport at all when the rooms are right next to each. You could have just had the player fall down a chute or something.
But enough of the nitpicking; let me add a few words about what makes this map such a big achievement: It's a complete package. We might be past the days where custom maps are just a repackaging of the content that SRB2 already offers, and custom scenery and enemies are becoming more and more common, but custom enemies that are actually thought-out and integral to the level design are still a rare sight. Plus, your gimmicks might not be exactly new, but the ways in which you combined them certainly are. As far as I'm aware, you're the first one in this community to do vertically moving conveyor belts. It's strange if you think about it; conveyor belts and vertically moving platforms are some of the oldest gimmicks in this game, so you'd think somebody would have thought of combining them by now, but apparently you are the first. Either way, it's an immensely fun combination, and it only gets better when you add maces to the mix. The same goes for the disappearing platforms, which I've never seen used so creatively in SRB2.
Prime 2.0 said that if this level were part of SRB2 proper, nobody would bat an eyelash. He might be quite right about that.
Ring Valley Zone - 5/10
For what it is, which is a training ground for visual design, it's a success. It does look very nice, although in a few spots I think you cluttered things up a bit too much with all those flowers. Gameplay-wise though? Eh. It's nicely done and all, but it's 2.0's special stages all over again. Collecting rings is just not very interesting on its own, and while the level layout was pretty decent, you did little to spice up this dull activity. At least the old special stages incorporated some additional challenges besides the main objective of "collect rings and don't lose them". So in the end it was kind of fun for two or three playthroughs, but there's very little to make me come back to it once I've seen everything. The boss was pretty sweet, although the attack with the Deton noise was kind of uninteresting. Also, getting Eggman to hit himself in the pinch phase, as much as I liked the idea, seemed to be mostly dependent on luck.
Now go work on ACZ2.
Mud Mines Zone 1 - 4/10
This was a disappointment. While Floral Road had its issues and wasn't exactly packed with interesting design, there were a few nice bits in it that I thought showed potential. This, however, doesn't only make all the same mistakes that Floral Road did, it also does away with all of the interesting stuff and adds a few new problems of its own. The level design this time around was just completely bog-standard and trite. Way too many rooms could be accurately summarized as "a bunch of platforms", and again they were so open and flat that all the "exploration" was painfully obvious. Not that it would have made much of a difference, since you didn't try to hide much besides tons of ring monitors.
By far the biggest offender on the "rote platforming" side was the outdoor room where you press a button to open the factory entrance. There is NOTHING interesting about this room. It's just a dull, monotonous mass of gray platforms, with a confusing path layout and an unnecessary button hunt. There's nothing technically
wrong with the platforming, but it has all the creativity and appeal of a staircase. I could have made a room like this in fifteen minutes, and judging from the visual glitch in the ceiling, you probably didn't take much longer. In general I get the feeling that you didn't spend an awful lot of time on this map.
The factory segment at the end was probably the best part of the level. While it was way too dark in some places (never go below 128 in Software) and the platforming was still very basic, at least the context for it was more interesting than just "a bunch of platforms". Still, there were some issues with this section: You had a habit of placing the next platform in places that are hard to see/reach from the current one, which often obstructed the flow. The corridors that connected the rooms were way too tiny and cramped. And the button at the end was pointless and only served to draw the attention away from the path to the goal, which might cause the player to unintentionally backtrack.
There were actual gimmicks this time around, but sadly they did more harm than good. The custom Crawla was pretty much a complete waste of resources. Crawlas are fundamentally uninteresting enemies since they're so easy to avoid (especially the way you placed them), and giving them two hitpoints doesn't change anything about that. The mud that slows the player down was equally pointless, only acting as a slight nuisance instead of an actual challenge. When combined with the floor crusher though, it was downright annoying. When the floor is moving up, you can only move forward very slightly by mashing jump, which is extremely irritating and impossible to properly control but pretty much required by the level design. It's fine to obstruct the player's movement, but not like this. In the same section, the safe spots were very hard to see, since the small indentations blend in with the uniformly gray ceiling.
The bouncy mud is a better gimmick in theory (although the visual implementation is kind of lazy - why would mud be bouncy?), and some of its usages were okay, but the way it was used in the left path of the path split was downright unacceptable. Again, the rooms are too dark to properly see the next platform (which is often indistinguishable from the pit), and too often it's hidden behind a corner or a pillar that you could hardly see it even in a brighter room. By the time of my second bounce, I'm already hitting the ceiling, so there's no good way to avoid the bouncy ceilings, which makes this section infuriatingly cheap. At the end, where the whole ceiling is bouncy, it becomes a game of luck. To add insult to injury, the last star post was several rooms prior, forcing me to redo a substantial part of the level each time I die.
The unnecessary custom ring boxes and the level-up feature are still there, although apparently you got the message regarding the last one now, so I won't ramble on about that. Overall, despite my harsh comments, I wouldn't call this a terrible map or anything. Most of it was fairly decent, solid but not very creative. It's only the disastrous implementation of the gimmicks that drags this below average. I'm sure that if you take this as an opportunity to learn from your mistakes, your next map will be a lot better.
