Sonny & Sonny 2

There's a new fan page on Facebook. I hear it's pretty cool. You can see the feed for it just to the right on the sidebar there. -> You should hop on and become a fan of my little operation here. There's a fan exclusive contest running now in which you design me a logo, and I give you (assuming of course you win) a free copy of "And Yet It Moves" by Austrian studio Broken Rules!
The business of running this site can get strenuous at times, and from time to time I forget that the games I play for fun should also be the ones I review. That why I started this thing in the first place! So today's post is dedicated to the Sonny series on Kongregate. If you don't have an account there, you should get one. With the waning of the PC era, sites like Kongregate and Newgrounds put up a fair bit of competition for XBLA and PSN. I'm a fan of consoles, don't get me wrong, but I came up as a PC gamer, and recently with the propagation of the next-gen consoles, it's feeling like the final days of Rome for us PC gamers. Best of all, these sites are free, which benefits poor folk like myself.
Sonny and Sonny 2 are turn-based action-RPGs. They take a new twist on the zombie story. Based in the near future, zombies have of course, taken over the distopia you, the protagonist, wake to find yourself approaching. It turns out you yourself are a zombie, and the story (which is actually pretty well written) takes you from a research boat with no memory through this broken world to figure out what's happened to you and what's going on in the world. The story punctuates the turn-based combat, and everything outside of the combat mode is for party management and flavor. The soundtrack consists of two songs, and the combat track is a thinly veiled clone of the title track for the Pirates of the Caribbean films, which, while neat at first, quickly became dull, and then abrasive. Combat itself is dynamic, intricate and well thought out. Kongregate places it in the strategy section for a reason. There are five classes to choose from in the first game, and they are all straightforward and have relevant and easy-to-understand ability trees. I will say, I've never seen such massive ability trees in a flash game before, and character customization and optimization are brilliantly realized in this series. The second game, however boils it down almost to a fault. There are only three rather nebulous classes with much more expansive ability trees. This increases character customization by quite a bit, but optimization can get rather tedious, and I was thanking the devs for the re-spec button by the end.
Overall, I like this game, and I spent quite a bit of time in the post-story challenge mode playing around with the options. Still, the number of possible power combinations and class specs is very impressive. The loading screen takes a while, but with that many toys, I call that fair. The achievements are lame and kind of unnecessary, but they earn you points for your Kongregate account, so I understand why they're there. I'd say play them. They're worth the time investment.
Do the right thing, people. Play indie games. Get the show on; get payed.