Colossal Cavern by kraykat - Review
Looks and Atmosphere
Your everyday SMW cave level. Only thing that bothered me was
this and the fact that there were saws and chains in a cave level. It makes kinda sense since you were near Ludwig's base, but I personally would've merged the castle and cave tilesests there. Speaking of Ludwig, the bridge cutoffs in the bossfight were kinda weird and unnecesary.
The music was your SM64 Hazy Maze Cave and Boss Fight, nothing to complain here, but I feel like this is nearly playing it too safe.
Also all items were SMB3 for some reason which felt kinda weird an SMW-styled level.
The fact that the blocks that raised the water looked just like normal ?-Blocks was also kinda strange.
So, the final verdict for this is
6/10
Gameplay and Design (counts double)
I wasn't too fond on it, the first section felt way too hard with the Swooper spam and the fact that you had to get to get both Springboards again if you couldn't do the jump to the 1st Yoshi Coin (also, you had to kind ajuggle both springboards sinc ejust bringing one to the left, placing it and getting another one makes the first one despawn). There were no extended borders underwater, causing you to be able to swin underwater. I'll get to this in more detail later.
You can't get up there unless you either jump on the Koopa or a Swooper or a carried a springboard with you, which isn't too great imo since you'd have to make them reload if you go off-screen.
The 2nd section was pretty short and useless, you could've ust merged this and the 3rd one.
In the 3rd section both Yoshi Coins could be gotten by doing the exact same thing from the exact same location. To make things worse, you can swim under everything, and sometimes you fall down and die because the water ends and sometimes you find a secret without any sign of it being there. You should've extended the walls at the places you could swim to. The 4th section felt too short once again and was pretty easy, too.
The 6th section also wasn't too hard and felt too short once again.
The 7th section was a boss where it was way too easy to walk intot he spikes in the beginning and the weird bounce physics if you jump on Ludwig's shell can throw you into the spikes really easily.
The Yoshi coins's distribuion was really strange. If you got the secret exit, you had two for sure. There were 3 of them in the 1st three section, with the midway point being onyl in Section 5. Normally Yoshi Coins are used as an indicator how far you are into a level, this wasn't really there in this level. And there's this strange door in Section 8 that puts you back to the beginning. Why is that? Well, to get all Yoshi coins, you have to play the level twice. i can't even put into words how bad that is (especially since Section 1 is by far the hardest section - something that isn't too great).
So, Gameplay and Design gets an
5/10
Verdict
A pretty bad difficulty spike and some flaws with the Yoshi Coins and Design in General keep it from being too good.
5.33/10
Moved to Average
