Oh man, it's great to see a new Jeri Tower! I absolutely loved the first one, and was really excited to play this. While I do think this is overall a great adventure with awesome music and a large variety of cool mechanics, such as the whole switching mechanic which reminds me of Toodee and Topdee...I'm a bit unsure of how I feel about this as I found it a bit more frustrating than fun!
Some notes of my experience:
*The game definitely feels like it gets way too hard, way too fast. Maybe it's not actually that hard if you know what you're doing and are patient and all that jazz, but I was getting wiped in some of the earlier levels and losing my patience. Feels like I'm playing Mario The Lost Levels instead of just Mario 2. Maybe you took that criticism that the first Jeri Tower had a slow start and went too far in the opposite direction, haha!
*The controls can be a bit finicky and annoying to deal with. No, I'm not talking about using ESDF instead of WASD, that's fine (though I have no idea why you did that) I'm more talking about other stuff, primarily the awkward delay when shifting forms, or aiming the gun with the mouse, which I wish would just fire in cardinal directions like the sword so you don't get slightly angled shots that don't make it all the way down a corridor when you want it to for example. My mouse also kept leaving the screen and messing up my inputs: it was the worst on the level where you have to aim at the brown blocks which are, guess what, right at the edge of the screen! It's like you were trying to screw me over.
*The game does have a lot of enemies and mechanics of all sorts which adds a lot of novelty, but I feel like it also kinda loses focus and just turns into a mish-mash of whatever. There was a long span in the middle where it felt like the levels completely forgot about the switching mechanic except in an incredibly token way, for example. Again, it's neat, but artistically it feels like it lost its identity.
*Game just feels like it was jerking me around. Jeri Tower was a fun time, but playing this made me grunt, scream and moan constantly, and I'm a pretty patient guy who likes to play rage games. I'm not even talking about some of the maliciously annoying mechanics like the stars that run away from you or the chaser dragons (though screw you for them anyway). No, I'm talking about stuff like how every level is a claustrophobic mess and just has so much damn busy work of clearing out enemies and collecting stuff before you get to try the part you're having difficulty with, only to fail and have to run it all back. There were also oddities like how the bouncing system works: I'm still unsure why some enemies die to it yet the same one will die later on. Add up all the previous complaints about the controls and such as well.
*How in the world does a game as long and hard as this not have a save system? There were so many times I would get frustrated or tired and want a break, only to tell myself that I have to keep pressing on, otherwise I need to do everything all over again, and I don't want that. Eventually, even knowing that, I just got too annoyed and shut it off around creature catcher ii or whatever it was called, most likely never to return, unfortunately. I had no problem returning to Jeri Tower to redo it when I realized it hadn't saved my progress, but this?
As frustrated as I was, I still want to try and view it positively. As said before, perhaps this is meant to be a sequel like Mario The Lost Levels was, a challenge pack for the diehards instead of starting from scratch again, and I imagine it would be good for those folk. Saying that, I thought I was one of those folk, but I dunno anymore.