Jazz Jackrabbit Collection

I don't usually write a review before finishing a game but I doubt these issues will get fixed later on in the game. The core gameplay is fun but the way the maps and camera are designed don't really work in harmony with Jazz's movement. The camera is really close and you don't really have how to react in time to a lot of stuff if you speed through levels. Without memorization of enemy placement that is. The game is clearly designed to be like the Sonic games. Speed is crucial. I often found myself shooting while moving to not get hit. You can hold up and down to look in those directions. After waiting for a pretty significant amount of time, you look below or above and the camera isn't put much higher or below Jazz. If you play it slowly not to get hit or try to use the camera controls, the game loses it's momentum. Weapon variety is there but most weapons shoot the same. The Toaster and RF Missile are just upgrades over the standard weapon. The Bouncer is inferior to all other weapons. It's a situational weapon. The TNT just wipes everything on screen. I had to use that a few times just to not get hit because of bad enemy placement. The monster placement isn't great. It just feels like they're put there to slow you down without having ways around them often. You see them and know it's not designed around thinking up smart ways to jump past them. It's not designed to make you shoot them on reaction since most take multiple shots to kill and you run pretty fast. You might run into them by the time the bullets hit. I had to just jump, shoot a few bullets and do this again multiple times to clear a path. Reactionary shooting wouldn't have been an issue if the camera was more zoomed out so that you can see more around you. With the bad out of the way, I need to praise the look of the maps and the music. They're great. Maps are diverse and complex. The visuals are top notch. The enemy design and gameplay is great as well.

HOW TO ZOOM THE CAMERA OUT and fix other issues: Copy OpenJazz to your game folder and start OpenJazz.exe. This should be included and set as default in the GOG release. https://www.dosgamers.com/dos/dos-games/jazz-jackrabbit My opinion is pretty much the same as last three reviewers: The game was nice in its day and still has nice graphics and music, but the slippery controls and other design choices are a constant irritation. I don't particularly like the time limits either, as I prefer to explore and find everything in each level without having to restart it from the beginning. While Jazz was a marvel in its day and took PC platforming years forward in a way that made it easy to look past its design choices, newer games have learned from those mistakes and are more enjoyable to play. Your killer rabbit will lose a quarter of his health by jumping on the back of a flegmatic tortoise, and those tortoises are placed everywhere. The game's mixture of happy run-and-gunning with awkwardly careful creeping didn't work for me anymore. Too many newer games offer better gameplay by either focusing on just one aspect or having spent years mastering a balance. Dead Cells lets you have fun whether you like to sneak around, melee, shoot or speedrun, Broforce is a nice take on a happy run-and-gun, and Door Kickers: Action Squad focuses on a slower, more tactical experience. You may like Jazz if you crave the nostalgia, aren't picky about controls and don't mind time limits. For others, time has run past this once-revolutionary rabbit.

Years ago i used to play this as a kid (still got the Disks somewhere) & so for me this was an easy buy.. as soon as i loaded the game good old nostalgia kicked-in, that goofy intro.. the in-game music and art, the hidden secrets and great level design.. damn, some of the most fun days i enjoyed!. I honestly still had fun playing this even today, the music is sublime, the art still looks good to me (game may need a little speed tweak as animations seem a little fast on my machine but that's an easy fix), Still very enjoyable and also a fun game kids can play. NOTE: This game is not Windows it is DOS, it runs on windows in DosBox. Also i vaguely remember a 'level' editor i had for this game, however this is not included in this version. Worth the asking price?.... yeah, although this game is a 90s game its a classic that could give you (or the kids) hours of fun.

Since I hadn't played any better platform games, I loved this back in the day. Coming back to it in 2020, it's still sort of fun, but it's just very evident that it wouldn't make a top 1.000 list of most well designed platform games from a gameplay perspective. It's very, very, very simplistic and the level design is sort of a disorganized mess. Just turn your brain off and vibe to the music while blasting turtles. Then it's actually kind of a good time.

But there is no way I am paying 15$(Can) for it. The extras a re good, and the game is awesome, but I believe that is more than I paid for it on 3.5" disks. Wait until it drops to 5.99 (or so, but when it does - JUMP on it! (See what I did there?) I hate puns, and I hate myself a little bit for what I did there.