Okay… Honestly, I’m quite shocked at how ridiculously overrated this hack is. It was nowhere near excellent; it might’ve only been half-decent, but nothing else.

Where do I even begin? I suppose I’ll leave level design for last.

Firstly, what I found really worrying is that literally everything felt slapped onto the hack without any coherence. I mean, the graphics, the music and the powerups were put into the hack like the author found them and went “hey this graphic/boss/song looks/seems/sounds freaking cool I SHOULD TOTALLY USE IT IN MY HACK!” and was simply squeezed into it literally for the sake of having something “AWESOME!!”. I mean, one level was a regular forest and the next level started with an 8-bit metroid-styled level. Seriously, what? Please, you should know a good hack isn’t defined by how much custom stuff it has, but how well planned, fun and cleverly used are all your resources. To make it even worse, the next sublevel continued as a completely regular SMW level. One thing is having no coherence between levels, and other thing is having no coherence of themes among the same single level; starting with a fire cavern then continuing with a sky level then go to an underwater level and ending in space is NOT GOOD, and will often confuse the player.

The overworld… The first submap was…decent, but it had some issues with the palettes, especially on the ladder. Most of the main overworld had serious cutoff and was really bland. Plus, it really felt like a blatant edit of the original. Just, try to vary the terrain but be sure to start from scratch.

Now onto the main and biggest issue: the level design. To put it simple: NOT FUN.

The first level was obviously an edit of level 105. But that’s not all: it couldn’t have been more repetitive. The whole level, the whole level consisted of bland terrain, a couple of slopes and it literally had only bob-ombs as an enemy.

About 85% of all the levels I played (yes, I stopped playing after waiting for something decent and fun to appear but that never happened) were extremely repetitive. Try something else besides copy-paste. Most of the enemies were seriously annoyingly placed and there were forced hits in some levels. There was cutoff everywhere, and lots of sprites were glitched (the bullet powerup glitches up in castles). I’ll admit it here, you had some very interesting ideas, but the way you pulled them out was all over the place and therefore made it something annoying to deal with rather that something I could enjoy having to play through.

What was very wrong was how you chose the music and graphics for the level. Most of the time the music never fitted at all with the level’s atmosphere. I mean, Forest Interlude–a calm and relaxing song– in a cemetery? SMB Metal–an incredibly fast-paced song– for grassland? What? The graphics weren’t great either. Most of the time you had amazingly detailed backgrounds mixed with SMW’s simple and cartoony graphics. NOT GOOD.

Overall, I seriously wonder if there was any planning made into this hack. The custom stuff was literally slapped onto the hack for the heck of it, and the levels were repetitive and unfair. You really need to learn some fundaments so you can make something that is at least appealing. I’m sorry, but this hack was NOT FUN, and it’s definitely nowhere near being called the best hack ever, like some people around here say; it’s just a regular beginner’s work.

Yes people, I don’t understand at all why you are rating this so high. You have some amazing hacks hosted here yet you praise this one like if there was something special about it; there isn’t.

2/10, only because you know how to insert custom stuff.