Rating Curve

What was even the point in making this level? Why was this level made? It's so boring and devoid of substance it's frustrating. All this is is Stereo Madness 10 times with some slight buffs introduced, it's blue the entire time, and the song has been replaced with a piano improv session. Oh, and the ending is a completely random chokepoint for no reason other than to add shock value and artificially inflate the difficulty of the level.

The thing that really irritates me about this level is how it presents itself. Stereo Madness x10, the original level that Stereo Sadness copies and never credits (plagiarism!), gets a pass because it tells you exactly what it is and that it's meant to be a challenge and a waste of time, nothing more. This level tries to present itself like it's something other than that when it does the bare minimum to change things up yet it goes by its own name and presents itself seriously.

If this was a tongue-in-cheek joke, it sure as hell got me. However, I can't imagine this being of comedic value to anyone, not even this level's creator. Don't waste your time with this level.

For almost every level trying to make a statement or really utilize Geometry Dash as a medium of art, I will always hold some amount of respect for them regardless of whether or not I think they're good or bad because I respect being bold and trying to do something more than just existing. However, in the radiator (which I'll call ITR for short) is past the realm of "agree to disagree" and it trying to make an artistic statement does not shield from the fact that is conceptually bad, horribly executed, and is a peek into an extremely self-destructive mindset, all of which are why I hold zero respect for this level.

I'll start by talking about the level itself. There is almost nothing to actually talk about inside ITR, it is roughly 4 minutes of an automatic level where the player drifts through a black void with quiet ambient music. I don't particularly like it nor do I particularly hate it, I just don't feel anything at all when I "play" the level. That's because none of the substance of the level is actually within the level itself. Instead, it's all in a pastebin found in the description of the official YouTube upload of the level. The pastebin has since been taken down, but an archival of it can be found here. I immediately take issue with this approach because it takes the route of "tell, don't show." While wless does try to explain in the pastebin some of the stylistic choices inside ITR, none of it changes the fact that the level itself is extremely boring. Whether or not they chose to make it this way does not change the fact that the level is inherently flawed. The level itself is so devoid of substance that the level could straight up not exist and wless could've just released the pastebin and not much would change. The pastebin's attempts at explaining away the problems of the level comes off similarly if an artist were to have a near-blank canvas and tried to write over 2400 words on how this canvas with almost nothing it was actually some subversive statement piece about art itself and the art market; they would look ridiculous and be laughed out of the room. Let's just call a spade a spade.

And now for the pastebin itself, while I don't agree with its message, I still want to talk about what I don't like about it. When I read it, it struck me as (1) extremely cynical, (2) very pretentious, and (3) a little bit doomer. wless talks about how the general norm for rating levels is starting to centralize on a "monogenre," experimentation is discouraged, and the GD mods and RobTop are the ones at fault for letting the rating system reach a point like this. While I do partially understand where they are coming from (though I think they are greatly exaggerating these problems), the tone of this pastebin and the general way they communicate their ideas makes me very uncomfortable and slightly concerned. Throughout the pastebin, wless seems to generalize all GD into two groups: those which fully cater to the standards and ones that don't at all. It's a very black-and-white way of looking at things. wless also carries this tone of being smarter and more lucid than the children who play this game and anyone who builds a level which caters to the standards in any way, even at one point in the pastebin calling themselves a "radical" (you aren't some unheard genius, you're just a 16-year-old with a shitty attitude). There is no other way to quantify someone who calls the rating system "the demise of creativity and experimentation" other than a doomer who gets themselves caught in slippery slopes and black-and-white fallacies.

The more I read this pastebin, the more it solidifies me giving this a solid 0. While I will almost always respect statement levels, I just can't do that when the statement in question is a look into a very self-destructive mindset and the level itself is just a hollow experience. The fact I feel nothing when I play the level while wless built it to express bottled up frustrations they've had for a long time is another failure of the level to properly convey emotions. ITR is just a something completely rotten, through and through.

(Disclaimer: I have not beaten this level yet, though I plan to. I have only done 2 practice runs, but I feel I have played this level more than enough to write a review.)

This is one of the worst levels ever released. I'm hesitant to just call levels a "waste of time," especially because someone can always view a level in a different, more positive light than I could, however I just do not see the possibility for that in TVOL at all. I have yet to speak with anyone who likes this level, much less anyone who has beaten it who has liked the level enough to consider it a worthwhile investment. In both my two practice runs, I have felt excruciating levels of boredom.

Before TVOL even places its first block, it already shoots itself in the foot with its song choice. Snowy Roads by Horsed is not a bad song - in fact, I like it - it's just not a useable song in the context of a GD level. It is 48 minutes long, calm, peaceful, and does not progress at all, almost like an ambient piece. It strikes me as more of a song meant to be listened to in the background while doing something else as opposed to trying to build a level around it, much less using its entire runtime of 48 fucking minutes. If you would struggle to make an enticing level with this song that is only 1 minute long, how on Earth would you think making one that is 48 minutes long would have any possibility of being good? This makes me inclined to think Snowy Roads was chosen not because it is a good song, but rather because it is long enough to build a level of absurd length. This is also supported by the how TVOL just completely fails with song representation, as there is not a single part that syncs with the song or matches how it feels in any way.

This ties into my next gripe - I am failing to establish a proper justification for why this level was made. I do not like to have debates on why a level gets made in the first place, it is a redundant debate for a lot of levels, and can be answered with something as simple as "I built it for fun." I can't see how hosting a megacollab and building a level this monotonous can be any fun to do. This level did strike me as somewhat pretentious with how the levels takes itself seriously, calling itself "the 48 min collab" and "the longest GD level" on the end screen as well as directly challenging a bunch of famous people to beat, including RobTop and Viprin for some reason? Some names make sense, like Guitar and Dorami (who ended up verifying it lol), but others don't and this reads to me as a cheap way of getting a bunch of famous, powerful players' attention. If your level is good, you should automatically have their attention and you shouldn't need to add something like this. These things really rub me the wrong way and make me doubt if this level was built to have a nice product, or to have the fame to come from working on a level of such huge ambitions, and if it is the latter, thank god this level never got rated.

I'm diving into the sustenance of this level quite late into the review as there just isn't a whole lot of meat or much things of interest throughout this level. It feels like a 6* collab from 2017 stretched to 48 minutes in length (yes, this level released in 2019, this is how far behind its time TVOL is). This level starts to feel like the same slog even when you're only 25% though, because it kinda is the same at some parts. There are 47 builders (I may have counted wrong), and none of the parts are a minute long, therefore there are repeat builders multiple times throughout the level. Despite some builders having multiple opportunities, not a single part of TVOL looks good now, and a lot of them didn't even look good in 2019. They are riddled with visual errors: bad layering, awful color combinations, block designs that make it difficult to make out the hitboxes, objects with glow enabled that shouldn't, glow deco overusage, and really empty and bland parts (both glow style and modern style). The gameplay also suffers a lot of flaws: invisible gameplay, buggy parts, inverted slopes, parts where it is hard to tell the hitboxes of gameplay because of the decoration, parts where it is hard to tell whether something kills you or not, all indicators that this level did not get anywhere near enough playtesting for its size. The worst problem with this level, worse than any of the gameplay flaws I listed out, is that this level is just boring to play for its entire runtime, which is the absolute worst thing a level of this length can end up as.

I really hope I never have to write a review this negative ever again. However, I just had to go all out on this level because I feel like this level is genuinely unsalvageable and flawed all the way down to its very core. I cannot see a reality where any amount of tweaking and QoL updates to this level can make it anywhere near bearable enough to learn and beat in its entirety. This level truly should have just been scrapped in favor of something that could've had an opportunity to turn out better, I'm sorry.