A reboot of the old flash games. There is little this game does better than Sonny 2. The art is more polished, there are more skill trees, more characters, and the story has an ending - that's about all this game has over it's predecessor.
The art is 'better', but the dark gritty feel of the original is lost.
The music is about the same in terms of quality.
There are more characters, but none are fleshed out or go through any meaningful arc.
The plot isn't anything special - predicatble, but well paced.
The voice acting is mediocre. Some of the VAs have bad delivery, some have good. The writing in the cutscenes is alright. The scene descriptons and metaphors are cool. The dialogue is badly written - corny, predictable, and cliche.
The characters are mostly trope-y and lack depth. The final boss is a fusion of Donald Trump and Elon Musk as a zombie. The joke's funny the first few times, then it gets annoying. It isn't even a good impression, there are better written Trump-isms in youtube comment sections. The final boss is by far the worst written thing in the game. It takes all of the story's impact away when the final boss is a literal joke. Could've had him be a mini-boss or a stage boss - that would have worked great. But the literal last thing you fight? Nope.
Complete retcon of the Baron. I get why the creators decided to chicken out. In the old games he was somewhat of a gay stereotype. Devs were probably afraid of being cancelled on twitter, or got some troll's remorse. However, the new Baron is lame in comparison. Unquestionable downgrade. Made him some sappy tragic character instead of the menacing over-the-top weirdo he was before. Not only that, in the old games he had his own special mechanics you had to play around. It gave his character extra weight, since you couldn't fight him the way you fight other enemies. The new Baron is just a stat-buffed version of some of the minion fights in the stage. The old 'problematic' Baron was a way cooler and more compelling final boss than Z'rump is.
The ending doesn't deliver. Not very satisfying, the lack of bond between the cast is very apparent and is somewhat confusing since there are hints of them warming up to eachother throughout the story.
The gameplay is still turn based, but now you have even less control over your party. In Sonny 2 you were able to set teammate AI as defensive, agressive, etc. In this one you can't influence them in any way.
A lot of fights hinge on countering the enemies' ability rotation, but if your loadout isn't well suited, you probably won't win the later fights. You may need to respec entirely and/or swap skill loadouts for a lot of the end game stuff. Investing points into ranking up abilities is mostly pointless, as an appropriate ability at rank 1 is infinitely better than a random max rank ability. This is similar to Sonny 2, but that game was less frustrating and more clear cut as to what's appropriate and what's not. Boss fights usually had fun gimmicks and the creativity poured into them carried the previous game.
Gear matters a lot, but there's not much of it in the game. You don't get many drops and the shop items aren't usually ideal. There aren't consistent stat spreads for classes or anything like that. Items have whatever stats the devs put on them, and it's your job to pick and choose to suit your build. Enjoyable on paper, frustraing in practice.
If I'm going for a speed build, and I skip higher level items because they offer no speed, I become 1shot-able since my defense is low. If I'm faster than the enemy, that usually isn't so bad, but since the item I have is so underlevelled, the speed on the item isn't enough to keep me ahead of the baseline speed of the enemy. So now I have to take generic Attack + Defense items and not play around my speed as much. This is ♥♥♥♥♥♥ when the only reason I picked the subclass was because I wanted to play a speed archetype. This game is like that in many aspects - you don't get to play out a fantasy, you are forced to adapt to the demands of the fight and the restrictions of the gear.
The gear upgrade system is also bad. Pay an exponentially growing price to roll a random stat buff for a max of 5 times. I sure do appreciate burning a tenth of my funds for a +30 defense to my +800 speed, +400 attack item. No problem, I'll just roll again for two tenths of my funds. +5 shadow resist. Amazing.
Some of the abilities are bad. They don't offer much help while taking up precious ability slots. There are obvious ability combos outlined for you, however you may not have time to set up even a 2 turn combo, because the enemy demands you counter their abilities constantly. Yes, my teammate has an ability that can counter the enemy, but he used it a turn too early and now it's on CD, so I have to do it myself - thus disrupting my combo.
The evolution system is cool, but since it's RNG it's very unreliable. If you just don't have the skills with the effects the fight requires, you can roll the dice on evolving an ability and getting that effect. So on paper, you should be able to beat any fight with almost any loadout, as long as luck is on your side.
Overall, a disappointment. I loved the Sonny flash games when I was a kid and was looking forward to wrapping the story up and experiencing the new and improved version of the game. However, this game did not deliver, as far as I am concerned.
Edit: Forgot some general jank, like screen going black when navigting menus and requiring a game restart. It'd also be cool to be able to back out of a fight without exiting to main menu, even when Sonny is not dead.
