Velone – Review
Inspired by Opus Magnum is a clever technique to avoid confessing that you copied everything from Opus Magnum and simply changed the appearance. Let’s compare it to its aforementioned ‘inspiration’ to see how obvious a replica it is:
To begin with, promoting other games from your publisher gives me a sour taste. It’s something I’d expect from a free-to-play game, but not from a game I paid for.
While there was a plot in Opus Magnum, you could skip it and go directly to the puzzles. I couldn’t skip the opening dialogue in Velone, which I couldn’t care less about due to the godawful voice acting.
Tutorials are very useful for teaching a player how to play a puzzle game. It was executed flawlessly in Opus Magnum. You were given a partial solution and instructed on how to finish it. Velone guides your hand through the puzzles, advising you where to put parts and which commands to execute.
By allowing you to store multiple potential solutions to a single level, Opus Magnum encourages you to try different types of optimization, such as utilising the fewest resources, the smallest area, or ignoring both and aiming for the fastest answer. The ability to save a looping gif of your answer is built-in. A level editor is included, as well as Steam Workshop connectivity. None of these characteristics are present in Velone.
In comparison to Opus Magnum, Velone simply feels less intuitive. I couldn’t figure out why my approach didn’t work even on the first level of Velone. Despite being given the ‘drop’ instruction, the arms did not release the stones.
