Marrying the best of PC and console platformers before it, Jazz 2 is a worthy last hurrah for the PC platformer.
Some might be surprised to know that the PC had its own thriving side-scrolling platformer scene, although it never made it to the 3D revolution (partly because of the massive success of first-person shooters, partly because standard 3D platformer controls make a gamepad with analog sticks all but mandatory). The PC sidescroller scene, inaugurated by Commander Keen (which, oddly enough, was developed by Id Software. Yes, that Id Software) and further developed by numerous titles from Apogee Software, Epic MegaGames, and others, de-emphasized jumping puzzles in favor of combat, usually giving the player a weapon (usually a gun, but Epic's Jill of the Jungle had creative guided throwing knives) and often a life bar, and filled the levels with much larger numbers of enemies, which were generally more challenging than the Sonic or Mario equivalents.
1994's Jazz Jackrabbit was particularly notable among these, not only for its excellent graphics and catchy soundtrack, but for its seamless integration of the speed-fueled thrill ride of Sonic the Hedgehog into a run-and-gun PC platformer milieu. Jazz was fast, at least as fast as the famous blue hedgehog, but he was also armed to the (buck) teeth, and the game was never short on things to blow up. It also had difficulty levels (which sadly never caught on in console platforming) that affected how many hits Jazz could take, how many hits enemies could take, and how long Jazz had to complete a level. The game also had a wry, sometimes fourth-wall-breaking sense of humor that gleefully parodied many competing games and was chock full of subtle jokes that made the game as fun for adults as for children (who probably didn't get some of the funnier gags).
Fast forward to 1998, at the height of the 3D revolution, and the fortunes for the platform genre were looking very grim on PC. Super Mario 64 had established a new direction for platformers, but it didn't translate well to PC. Meanwhile, hardware accelerated video cards were becoming an increasingly common component, with games like Half-Life and Quake II taking advantage. A sprite-based 2D platformer in these circumstances seemed doomed, especially one with the misfortune to have been released from the same company as and right after Unreal, which needs no introduction. But that's exactly what Jazz Jackrabbit 2 was, and it soon developed its own cult fanbase--marrying the best of PC and console platformers before it, Jazz Jackrabbit 2 was a worthy last hurrah for the PC platformer.
Even by the standards of the era, Jazz 2 was not a technical marvel. Its hardware acceleration mode was extremely basic and actually reduced graphical quality by removing the lighting system (which really amounted to a darkening of the screen with a bright spot around the character in dark areas). There were a few basic particle effects, but no filters or anti-aliasing, and the only 3D component was a double-plane sky with horizon that appeared in the background of some levels. The game data amounted to only 40 megabytes all up, despite having two (short) cartoon cutscenes. Despite this, it still looks good, with well-drawn, crisp graphics that make the most of their limited resolution, a charming art style, and vibrant colors (all the textures were 8-bit, but the game could be rendered in 16-bit). The game engine allows for up to 8 parallax-scrolling layers to captivate players and infuriate level designers. It's amazing to see, on the Carrottus levels, a few independently scrolling sheets of 2D tiles merging into a seamless landscape stretching far into the distance. It's truly a game that is graphically more than the sum of its parts.
There are a few wrinkles. Whether it was for the sake of 320x240 support, artistic laziness, or whatever, the game's tiles and sprites are the same resolution as in the original Jazz Jackrabbit. Jazz is only about 40 pixels tall, and a single tile 32, and at high resolutions (the game supports up to 1024x768), everything seems awfully small, and large sections of the level are visible in all directions. Some of the blending and water effects look very strange in 8-bit color mode. The introduction video uses the same cartoon as the shareware version and explains nothing of the plot (which is detailed in a comic-book section of the manual), because the intended intro sequence had to be cut due to time constraints. Some features, like the "wind up" for high speed, colored springs, and TV-screen powerups, are perhaps too reminiscent of Sonic for their own good, and the new soundtrack, though using the same format as the first game's, is not as catchy and lacks the "attitude" of the first Jazz Jackrabbit's music.
Jazz 2's plot is very simple and makes little sense, but sets the theme for the action well enough. After his success in beating turtle crime lord Devan Shell (tortoise and the hare, get it?), Jazz has finally won over the beautiful Carrottus princess Eva Earlong, and the two are about to marry in a formal ceremony. Jazz's mentally deranged kid brother Spaz is the ring bearer, giving Eva an absurdly large diamond ring. But Devan has the last laugh. He needs the enormous diamond on that ring to power his time machine and wipe the Carrottus rabbits from history (don't think about this plot too much), and sends a minion to break into the castle and snatch it off of Eva's finger. Queen Earlong, Eva's mother, is furious that Jazz failed to get rid of Devan Shell completely, and locks him in the castle dungeons, but Spaz breaks him out and the game begins.
The game lets you play as Jazz or Spaz, and the differences are more than a sprite swap and wacky laughing sound effects for Spaz. He has a double jump instead of Jazz's gliding using his ears as a helicopter rotor (nowhere near as useful as Tails' similar move in Sonic the Hedgehog), and instead of Jazz's high jump (which will damage enemies above Jazz), a flying kick that can travel through several enemies in a row and severely damage bosses. In fact, Spaz is in practice a much more powerful character, can reach places that Jazz cannot, and players using him dominate Jazz players in multiplayer. Spaz's personality is eccentric to say the least, and he twitches, rolls his eyes around, lets his tongue hang out, and laughs maniacally when jumping or running very quickly, whereas Jazz is much more subdued.
Both characters control fluidly and simply, with the same key combinations used to activate their respective special moves, and running, jumping, and shooting feel very natural. The tilesets are carefully "masked" with areas defined as solid or pass-through to make getting around them easy and prevent getting caught on scenery. Most of the weapons are intuitive enough, and in-game text does a good job of telling you about environmental features such as special-weapon blocks and rotating platforms (as well as storyline fluff and jokes). The player should have a general hang of things within 15 minutes.
The gameplay takes the emphasis on combat instead of jumping over bottomless pits to its ultimate conclusion. The game engine doesn't even support death pits (at the bottom of the level area, if there is no ground in the way, your character will just be stuck there in a falling animation, but there are no places where this bug can happen in the original levels), and spikes will only take away one of your five health units, represented by hearts. Of course, there are areas that require dexterous movement and jumping to avoid extended exposure to hazards like spikes and fire or a swarm of enemies, but the environment is not the primary threat in Jazz 2. On the other hand, some of the enemies can be quite tricky. There is a fencer who jumps around erratically and has a very fast lunge attack, bees that move maddeningly quickly and even go through terrain blocks, flying lizards that throw bombs, a bong-smoking caterpillar that releases rings of pot smoke that distort the screen and reverse your controls (I don't know how this enemy got past the ESRB with an "E" rating), and monkeys that toss bananas like grenades and are often positioned high above you, requiring you to expose yourself to their fire repeatedly to wear away their ample hit points.
Overall, Jazz 2 is a quite easy game, but there are some more difficult moments, such as an underwater sequence full of rabbit-eating fish that move much faster than Jazz can swim (fortunately, Jazz seems to have infinite lung capacity), and there is not a consistent climb in difficulty--after an easy first episode, the difficulty constantly rises and falls and rises again. The average gamer should be able to beat its four (five if you include the shareware demo levels, which are included along with the full game levels) episodes in a few hours.
Jazz and Spaz have a plethora of various items and powerups to aid them in their quest. The game's 10 weapons all have different properties, although the starting blaster is effective enough (devastating with a weapon powerup) and has unlimited ammo, and the order in which weapons are numbered has little bearing on their actual power. Fastfire powerups allow you to increase the speed at which you can fire automatically, which frees you from having to hammer the spacebar down as fast as possible. Four quasi-elemental shields are available (water, fire, electric, plasma), and unlike their Sonic counterparts, do not confer any elemental resistances, but give the player unique weapons while active. Getting hit decreases the time left to use them, so the player is encouraged to be careful and get all the mileage they can out of them. Food items (which can trigger a period of invincibility called the sugar rush after collecting 100 of them), carrots (replenish health), weapon powerup boxes (increase the power of your weapons), coins (allow access to secret areas stuffed full of powerups and treasure) and other items are also sprinkled liberally throughout the levels.
Despite the general excellence of this game, there are numerous signs throughout the game that it was rushed late in development (which was confirmed by Epic), possibly due to being sidelined to get Unreal out. The first episode clearly establishes a pattern that a boss follows each themed set of two levels (each tileset has two variations, day and night, and a corresponding pair of levels, one day and one night), but subsequent episodes break away from this convention, placing bosses at the ends of episodes and occasionally right in the middle of an episode, at one point right at the end of the first map of the "hell" unit instead of the second. One boss called the "Tweedle Boss" was apparently intended to go in the Alice in Wonderland/'60s drug trip map set in episode two, but has no sprites and no AI, and never appears in the original game (but can be placed in a map using the editor). Several other unused enemies and items are also missing proper code. The intro cutscene, as stated before, was recycled from the demo version of the game due to time constraints. The first versions shipped with several bugs, which were fixed by a series of patches. The built-in level editor includes tilesets from the original Jazz Jackrabbit, but they are missing animations, backgrounds, and masking, and are mostly useless (the community has released fixed versions of all of them, and some tilesets from the original game which weren't translated to Jazz 2 in the first place).
Although the game was commercially a failure (and probably sank its European publisher Project2 Interactive), it managed to spawn two expansions, Holiday Hare '98 (a set of three Christmas levels with two new enemies and a new version of an extremely difficult boss that was cut from the original game), and The Secret Files, a more substantial addition. The Secret Files is a stand-alone game, but the original Jazz 2 episodes can be copied over to it, giving you six episodes, and even Holiday Hare to make seven (and completely fill the episode screen). It has a new version of the engine, version 1.24, that includes several new enemy types and support for much larger tilesets than the original. Even a new character was added, a female rabbit named Lori, who wore athletic gear to decently cover her womanly features and had the terrible misfortune of lacking any sort of high jump move. Unfortunately, American publisher Gathering of Developers decided not to publish it, which means it was sold only in Europe, requiring Americans to use eBay or piracy to get it.
Jazz 2 has a built-in multiplayer, although the master servers have long since gone down and games must be joined manually through looking up their IP addresses on fan sites. Players can use Jazz or Spaz, whose fur and gear can be palette-translated into a number of different colors. Game modes include battle (essentially deathmatch), race, capture the flag, and cooperative, although clever level designers have used trickery to invent other game modes using specially designed maps. The game's multiplayer security isn't very good, making it vulnerable to cheat utilities and game-crashing exploits. The inevitable decline of the community into a hardcore few has probably driven out most of the disruptive players by now.
Jazz 2 came with a fully-featured level editor, although making levels can be deceptively difficult and time consuming, requiring the user to master parallax layers, event placement, and other features. Several items and enemies that never appeared in the original levels can be found in the editor, but not all of them work correctly. Bugs discovered in the game can be exploited to add strange effects such as scenery pieces that fire weapon projectiles or sprite-swapped enemies and other items, although many of them are quite glitchy and not useful in many situation. Outside utilities can extend the editor's functionality, including a program that creates new episode files, and new tilesets can be created for the game. Fan sites like the popular Jazz 2 Online offer hundreds of new levels, episodes, and tilesets, one of the most famous being a "heaven" tileset with an accompanying demonstration level, complete with pearly gates, clouds, and golden statues of harp-playing rabbits. To this reviewer's knowledge, there is no known methods to make in-depth mods that add new enemies or weapons or seriously change the game's behavior.
Overall, despite some minor flaws, Jazz Jackrabbit 2 is an excellent send-off for the side-scrolling PC platformer, and one of the genre's best titles. Those interested in side-scrolling platformers are strongly encouraged to give this game a shot. It never really got the chance it deserved.
What's Hot: Fluid controls, intuitive gameplay, great art style, consistently funny
What's Not: Some rough edges and missing features, limited availability of the most complete versions of the game, no longer supported by the developers, not particularly original, not particularly challenging
Also Try: Commander Keen: Goodbye Galaxy, Duke Nukem II, Sonic the Hedgehog 3