Story: Welcome to another MS-DOS era game where the game design came first and the plot second. In fact the game's instruction option in the main menu covers the plot literally with three pictures:
This really does about sum up everything pretty succinctly. The next page does expand on this slightly, but that really boils down to giving the characters their full names (Jazz Jackrabbit, Princess Eva Earlong, and Devan Shell) and and explaining Devan is the leader of the turtle terrorists who has kidnapped Eva in his bid to conquer said planet. But this basic explanation will be enough to let the game cover 6 episodes as Jazz chases Devan through the galaxy in his mission to rescue princess Eva... and literally nothing else.
6/10
Graphics: Right from the opening, Jazz Jackrabbit where's it's artistic style on it's sleeve. Before you even reach the title screen, you are greeted with a hand drawn opening video of Jazz pulling himself out of his rabbit hole (complete with Looney Tune style mailbox) and jumping into a phone booth to change into various costumes for classic comic super heroes while he is praised as the hero to be, before just wearing a bandanna and armbands while carrying a huge cartoony gun he will use throughout the game. Let this set the tone of personality the game will carry the entire time. It never takes itself too seriously, choosing a more stylized tone instead.
And to this end the game looks pretty good! Everything is colorful, bright and fluid as it scrolls by at high speeds. If you can get a chance stop and look, you will see a pleasant cartoonyness that permeates everything as well as surprisingly subtle details for a game made before modern resolutions were commonly used to play games on home computers.
Nor is this going to be a single note game, as it will change environments regularly before you reach the end of even episode 1! (This game was available via shareware where the first episode is free, but you had to buy it to get episodes two through six.) Before you are done you will travel through grasslands, factories, gold mines, and even hitch a ride on battle cruisers just to name a few of the locals. Hell you will even spend some time in the home of other Epic titles! To see it all done so well just proves good art really does keep looking good long after a game comes out: especially for 2D side-scrollers like this.
As for those who populate these levels, that can be a bit more hit and miss. Taking more from the style of the opening cartoon, Jazz looks pretty good and so does his few allies he gets on occasion while you play, but they are fairly limited in number (in fact I only found 1.. I found him a lot, but I only found 1), Enemies are far more varied as most areas include their own types of enemies and hazards, but these run the scope from somewhat menacing to cartoon goofy to just stupid. (You tell me those electric shock icons with eyes look like anything outside for the artist running out of ideas: I dare you.) And by the time you get used to them, they are gone for the next world and their selection. The few that stick between worlds tend to be a couple of specific turtle enemies that will pose little threat and just become somehow even more background because they are so common.
Still, the end result is a game that looked fantastic when it came out and holds up shockingly well... not just for it's age, but in general!
8/10
Sound: If you were around for the MS-DOS era of PC gaming, you already have a good idea of what the soundscape is going to be. The adlib midi music pulses through your speakers with high energy drums and synth guitars (and just blatant electronica) to keep the rock and roll tone and you in the game, but very little (if any) of it sticks out from the sea of 90s game soundtracks all trying to do this. It overall sounds great while playing, but do not expect to remember any of it long after you shut the game off.
Same is unfortunately true of the sound effects that make up the game. Everything makes the expected blips, bloops, and bleep while gunfire sounds like gunfire, but there is little here to really stand out from what other PC games were doing at the time. The only thing that stuck with me were two of your guns: the basic pea-shooter and the "toaster." The latter is a fire blast that gave off a growl when firing that just felt satisfying, and while the pea-shooter was just a little quick boop, it was deep and meaty, so when you got some good rapid fire to go with it, it just sounded right.
As for voice work, there are surprisingly a couple of lines I was able to find! Particularly three by Jazz himself. When he gets hit, he actually says "ouch" and "yum" when you pick up carrots (how you get life back), as well as a single full sentence. Leave your controls alone long enough, he will look at the screen and ask "What are you doing?" It's not much, but the standards at the time were set by the 16-bit era consoles where space for the game was at a premium, so wasting any of it on voice-sample was usually something you didn't expect.
7/10
Gameplay: Unfortunately, this is where the game disappointed me. At it's core, Jazz Jackrabbit is a side-scrolling shooter that clearly and absolutely wanted to be just like it's console counter part that just launched 6 months or so prior: Sonic the Hedgehog 3... just with guns. You blast down tunnels and across landscapes at breakneck speeds as you race the clock (except on easy difficulty where that is just a score bonus), firing away to kill every turtle and ally of theirs you come across... and that's where the issues begin.
Where Sega's system-seller series was based on speed, it balanced the levels you play in to let you take the time you actually needed to platform your way around, reserving the speedy play for areas you would run into nothing that would ruin the feel of it. Most enemies when you hit that speed as long as you got Sonic into a spin, would be crushed to the delight of the player. There were even hard stops to prevent Sonic from slamming into hazards and getting killed before the player knew what was going on. Hell, even the ring mechanic worked in the favor of the game since even though it was only one extra hit, it was fairly easy to reclaim a few rings to get your footing on the chance that something did go wrong.
Unfortunately for players of Epic's game here, however, this title has nothing near these considerations. Jazz's speed is not determined by slopes, in any way, but only by how long he's been running, letting him build up speed at any time regardless of what's around him and if you barrel full speed, you are likely to careen headfirst into an enemy, a spike pit or any number of obstacles that will steal chunks of your health bar, resulting in a game that wants you to go fast, but punishing you for it until you've memorized the map. Add to this some fairly slippery controls and momentum for Jazz to stop and you have a recipe for disaster.
And let's take a second to focus there. Somewhat slick controls can be adjusted to and even used to a player's advantage sometimes and memorization was always a part of these games, so if the situation ended there it would be annoying, but just a game not aging as well as it could. But the devs for this game decided at several moments they had to be "clever" and setup obstacles that would whip Jazz around via some mechanic for just that world, bullet him around so fast the screen can't keep up and you have no idea what's going on anymore or put "traps" in his way that would not so much hurt him, but send him bouncing back to earlier parts of the map and redo hard-earned progress. If you miss something by going as fast as the game wants, you could just lose a lot of progress because some dev thought it would be funny to troll the player like that. It just seems like intentionally bad design like you might see someone try to piss off players in a Mario Maker style game with.
5/10
Story: There is literally no story to this new chapter for Jazz. Rather this is more of a free level pack themed for the holidays. There isn't even anything to end the event: just a screen saying "call this number for more adventures" and then a message wishing everyone playing a Merry Christmas. (And no, I did not call a number that was offered in 95 to see if it still worked. I am not going to recommend doing so either) As such, I really can't say anything here.
N/A
Graphics: While this expansion looks good, I can't really add to the technical aspects any further then I did talking about the main game. As noted in the story section, this is merely a free level pack released to run on it's own. Literally the game will greet you with title and menu screens that are just about exactly like the main game. The only differences is that they have put Christmas costumes on everyone. Even selecting a new game will show you the exact same menu as the main title, just with everything but this single episode unselectable: it really is that unvaried from the original title.
As for actual graphic work on this engine, you can expect, however only Jazz himself to be the same as he always was. Everything else has been given an over hall to celebrate the holidays with two new worlds: one made of candy and the other of building blocks. And they actually look really good, bright and colorful. Maybe the space behind the map could have been done better in them, but really where it matters these worlds actually look beautiful. This is especially true of the building block world where the devs went wild, even offering random toys that while unneeded add a flair all their own to the space you are in. (And some of which you can blow up just because!)
Unfortunately I can not hold the same praise for the enemies this time around. Don't get me wrong, they look fine individually, but the selection used is incredibly limited. Basically they are sprite swaps of enemies you have already faced in the main game (giant stumbling rats instead of turtles walking around and the like), but even as they tried to vary the enemies you face, the didn't always vary these sprites, so you are maybe going to see three in total with one literally behaving like several different enemies depending on what it replaced. Basically toy planes are just about every enemy included in these maps.
6/10
Sound: Honestly there is even less I can say that hasn't been said in the main game's review when it comes to sound then even graphics! Where everything in the game was at least given a new sprite (even if a lot of them used the same one), the only thing new for the ears within this special episode is one single music track. Best I can tell, the lego blocks returns to the tradition of the franchise, but the candy world will have you playing to a bit of an energic take on Carol of the Bells, which actually does sound pretty good. There just isn't much else to offer here.
5/10
Gameplay: Like most of this expansion, I can't say much more then I did during the review of the main game. This expansion is just a short episode offered for free, both in the name of the holidays and as an ad for the main game. It's only here now to make a complete collection of what was made with the first game easier to maintain. As such it literally offers less new then even the graphics and sound. It is also insanely brief with only 4 levels: two for each planet. There isn't even a boss encounter to top everything off. Basically if you like Jazz Jackrabbit, this is a small extra slice to play with before wrapping up and literally nothing else: with all the same strengths and weaknesses.
4/10
Bugs: Honestly for all the faults I have with this little collection, bugs are not one of them. This ran flawlessly.
Digital Rights Management: There is no DRM for anything in this gamepack. - Source: PCGamingWiki
Overall: As much as a lot of old PC gamers tend to be nostalgic for this game, I'm afraid I have to report it didn't age very well. It suffers the same issue as the Sonic titles it was an answer to: you simply can't see far enough ahead of you to run full speed through the levels like the seem to want you to without wrecking yourself. However, where Sega's games are designed well around this with well established points to let you rip lose, this game simply had no concept of such things and controls that are not nearly as tight to boot.
Add to this developers wanting to be clever with traps that will catch any player who isn't familiar with the level and if you are lucky will only hurt you but most likely set you back in the level itself and cost you precious time which, unless you are playing on easy, can cost you your life, and I just don't feel like this is a great game to play anymore so much as an artifact of it's day.
Unless you are really itching for some nostalgia, I would skip this one.
Score:
System Requirements:
- ANYTHING running at 1.8 Ghz
- Any GPU that supports at least DirectX 7 (DirectX 9 reccomended)
- 512 MB RAM
- Windows 7, 8 , or 10
- 1 GB hard drive space
System Specs:
- Ryzen 5 5600G running at 3.9 Ghz
- 16 GB RAM
- Windows 11
- PDP DX Wired Controller (Crimson)
- AntiMicro (to emulate KB&M on a controller)
Source: Gog.com
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