Breakthrough Gaming is one of those indie companies next to RainbowSpin & Zakym where they release some of the worst kinds of shovelware where they barely qualify as games. As you would expect they are an easy target for people wanting to boost up their achievement/trophy numbers especially for PlayStation owners super fast and easy platinum trophies that you get without effort. It's hard to believe that people still buy them even today which is the example of bad taste that isn't good for anyone but and that leads to more games of this kind being released on digital game stores. Breakthrough Gaming mainly releases games that are christen themed but they have something that stands out from all of the other shovelware trash and that is the Project Summer Ice game series which has many, many games under it's belt.
The Project Summer Ice games were a series that had a bunch different games that was separated into different stories. Most of which came out on PC but the vast majority of the games came to consoles. The games also went through different genres most of which entered RPG to Visual Novel. Each of the games released were released into different parts with there being fifteen games that are usually separated into five or so parts so technically you'd be playing through over fifty or sixty or so games in this series with the PlayStation 4 versions having in total forty-two games currently released which is completely insane. So let's talk about what this series is about and give my thoughts on each one. I will however be talking about the PlayStation 4 versions that were released because if I talked about every version of the game I'd be taking too long to get this done. Also rather then talking about each individual part of each of the Project Summer Ice games in different review blogs that I would normally do, I decided to compile all of the games together into a single blog. So with all that said let's dive in and do a review on the entire Project Summer Ice games released on PlayStation 4.
Project Summer Ice Bowling Series
So the first of the Project Summer Ice games to come out was the Bowling Storyline, and these are separated into three different storylines following Jane, Pammy and Mark. Each of the three characters have storylines that are separated into different parts, Jane & Pammy have six parts whereas Mark has five, but that's not all the three characters also have a game each where it is nothing but a short introduction of them and after you read through their story you'll earn a Platinum Trophy, so read through Jane's, Pammy's and Mark's storyline introductions which are all separate by the way and then you'll have three Platinum Trophies on your PlayStation Profile which is pathetic.
Three of the main characters Jane, Pammy and Mark are college students that introduce themselves to Bowling and eventually they start preparing for the Bowling Tournament. In between the Bowling practices Mark watches Jane and Pammy play and also sees interest in Jane which makes Jane want to go out on a date with him. The storyline is simple yet kind of uninteresting until one of the later parts where Mark pulls a phone out to watch a video and takes more interest in that than dating Jane which upsets her. It shows that Mark gives no care for anything kind of like how I don't really care for a shovelware game that looks so poor in quality. Yeah the resolution for the Bowling games are in a very low resolution with the images being in awful JPEG quality and what I also don't get is why the games have a very poor framerate. Seriously the Bowling games don't even run smooth.
The Project Summer Ice Bowling games are a visual novel where you watch the storyline unfold, everything in them are very straight forward and there are no dialogue options to choose from which would have changed the outcome of the storyline, not that the story is all that interesting anyway. Occasionally you'll get into a sequence where you get to do some bowling and honestly the bowling portions are not very good. Instead of being able to position yourself and how you would like to aim the ball like you could in a proper bowling game Wii Sports instead the positioning is automatic and you have to press the Cross Button to stop the positioning and then an arrow will come up waving back and forth automatically in which pressing the button again will throw the ball at that direction you pressed the button at. It is difficult to get the timing down for the best throw possible to get the majority of pins to set you up for getting all of the pins within two ball throws. The ball physics are not great either there are times the ball will bounce off to hit the pins while other times the ball will just stick to the top or bottom sides of the screen and not hit the pins which makes the bowling gameplay awful.
For the trophies of those games you just need to watch all of the storyline in each part of the games in-between doing the bowling sequences. The Bowling sequences will have different number of rounds to play and you just need to get a certain amount of points to get the trophies and these are only difficult because of the awkward bowling mechanics. It will take a fair amount of attempts to get the points during the bowling sequences needed for the trophies with how annoying the placing and aiming really are but after that you'll then need to do the same in a single player bowling game and then you'll have a couple of fast platinum trophies unlocked on your profile.
There is also the Bowling Tournament sequence which is in the Pammy Storyline where you play a couple of rounds to get the highest amount of points possible. Depending on the amount of points you got would determine the ending you get and what you would do after playing the sequence is type in the code on the website and then you'll get the ending which is kind of ridiculous. Why couldn't they just programme in multiple endings onto the actual game and see the different endings play out depending on the amount of points you got instead.
There is also the Bowling Online Edition where on top of the storyline to play through it also has online multiplayer which you wouldn't believe. However unlike every single multiplayer game where you just jump into a server and easily wait for another player instead you have to send a room code or type in a room code that one of the players give to you. It's so inconvenient like why would anyone need to type in a simple room code just to start a bowling match, it's so dumb. What's worse is that there are online trophies that require you to play with 5 different people in a single session without turning the game off which makes the online multiplayer terrible.
Lastly there were the three Bowling Pinball games that concluded the storylines for Jane, Pammy and Mark. The Pinball aspect is the best part of the bowling storyline because they run smooth and there is actually a game that actually functions. The Bowling Pinball games play decently as Pinball games where you use the bumpers to get the ball to hit the objects to score points. They are decent and do some seem fun with the exception that you don't get to do the starting pull shot, instead you move the ball around the pinball area and then press the button to drop the ball down which is which is not how a pinball game is meant to be played.
So overall the Bowling Series of games have some pretty bad bowling mechanics that is the obligatory thing making the games last longer and the storylines aren't really all that interesting. In terms of the platinum trophies if you put six parts of both Jane and Pammy and five for Mark together as well as the Online Bowling and the three pinball games also, that in total is twenty one platinum trophies that you earn easily without too much effort besides the awful bowling sequences.
My First Date RPG Series
The next series in the Project Summer Ice franchise that Breakthrough would release on the PlayStation 4 is My First Date RPG which has six games that are separated into two characters named Oriana & Elliot who are both high school students who meet each other at the bus stop. The first story parts cover the backstory into the two characters in which Oriana is looking to be a model as her job career while Elliot is working a part time job while looking to go full time after graduation. Simply put the storyline is two students looking to graduate and decide their future careers which is all you need to get to know the two characters.
As for gameplay there is little to no gameplay involved here, you basically go from one screen to another to trigger the next cutscene letting you move onwards but it is very, very straight forward with no actual game elements happening. You do get dialogue choices in one of two of the cutscenes but they are very easy to guess what choices to make and the story cutscenes aren't really all that interesting. At least the games run smooth and the environments done on RPG maker don't look too bad but the anime portraits still look awful with the JPEG quality pixelation.
So My First Date RPG really isn't very good, the games are super short and there really isn't any RPG involved. There's nothing to level up & you don't anything gameplay wise from picking the best dialogue options. All three parts of any of the two characters take about two to three minutes each to complete and the platinum trophies are straight forward to get. Complete the three parts for each of the two main characters you'll have six super easy platinum trophies.
Our Church & Halloween RPG Series
The last of the Project Summer Ice game series that was brought to the PlayStation 4 is the Our Church & Halloween RPG. Unlike the other games released thus far where there is no RPG what-so-ever this series is as close to also playing like a full RPG as it can...well kind of, plus also it falls into that Christian themed gaming that the series claimed that is was to be about but also one all about Halloween. The storyline for this one is protagonist James has to go up to a mountain before Halloween for something that was his fault. The Our Church & Halloween series is divided into twelve different games, the first three games are just simple introductions to James, Erin and also another character called Scott who turns out to be one of the bad guys later on. After you play their introductions you are given a super short stage on each of them where you must reach the finish line in only a couple of seconds and the route is really easy to navigate through, earning you three easy platinum trophies.
The main storyline for Our Church and Halloween is split up between six games. Starting with Part 1, when James goes up to a mountain he moves one of the rocks which causes a ghost spirit to awaken and then tells him to move all of the rocks in the correct order which then opens up access to a cave. James' friends Erin, Sam and Amy jump into the cave and reach a dead end where Sam and Amy are then kidnapped by ghosts. James alongside Erin must journey across the maintain to rescue their friends.
The overall look of the game is the highlight of this package, the Our Church & Halloween RPG games are presented in a black & white screen almost like you are playing on an old black & white Gameboy device which does look authentic despite the text and the anime portraits in the introduction games looking very pixilated. Seriously they can get a game to run smoothly at 60 Frames Per Second but they couldn't get the resolution correctly with casing pixelation problems. It also sounds like an old Gameboy game as well and it manages to sound pretty well.
In the second part up to the fourth part you are finally given random encounters with the ghost enemies using a slingshot. The turn based combat is super basic, you either attack using the slingshot or using an apple which heals you up. You always will encounter one enemy at a time and you start encounters by touching them on the field. There are boss encounters which you encounter throughout the storyline but they are not challenging at all provided that you have enough apples and high HP to deal with them. Every single battle you win will increase your health and nothing else, there are no other RPG mechanics put into the games like you don't get any new weapons or abilities which would be good in combat. Also the enemy variety is lacking it mostly consists of ghosts that look like a black spiked square cube, one where it is a black square shape and one where it is a black circle with four tubes sticking out.
Parts Two, Three and Four has a save feature but for some reason it uses a password system where you type in different number codes to continue where you left off. Why must there be a game in this day and age where you have to put in a password code to continue the game. I know that this game plays the video games of old where you had to use password to continue where you left off because video games of the 8-Bit & 16-Bit era didn't always relay on a Battery Back Up functionality but come on really!? even the many RPGs on the original Gameboy didn't utilize a password feature.
Lastly Part Five where James and Scott are by themselves has abandons the RPG and there is no fighting involved. It is nothing more than navigating through two super short mazes and if you can get through those fast enough you'll earn the trophies and an easy platinum trophy without any effort. That's not all there two separate games to Part Five, one focusing on James and the other on Scott and they both play the same, no changes, no differences from one another, nothing even the cutscenes are the same so why have two different versions of Part Five of the story if you are going to do anything different?
What's worse is that the developer left the storyline on a cliffhanger, yes I swear that's true. So after saving Sam and Amy it is revealed that the spirit was a church pastor's son Scott who tricked James into going to the mountain and then when he appears he imprisons the party while he goes after his father who is the church pastor. After the party escape they rush back to witness Scott taking all the money from the church and then leaves taking Erin with him. Scott plans to use the money for his invention that will change the world. James then catches up to Scott by getting on a ship invested with ghosts and after saving Erin and deal with the ghosts. James and Erin then try to steer the ship only for Scott's back up plan to come into play to make the ship crash which separates the trio. Erin would wash up back at the church while James and Scott would end up at an unknown island. After being washed up on shore the two are then forced to stick together and get themselves through some caves before reaching service only to get captured by pirates and that's where the storyline ends. I did check the Breakthrough Gaming website to see if the developer is continuing the storyline and there is a six part coming soon but the website didn't have a complete release date yet. Will Breakthrough Gaming come back to the Our Church and Halloween series and finish story and learn the fates of James and Scott? We may never know.
And finally Our Church and Halloween series has three different pinball games. With these they are like the Project Summer Ice Bowling Pinball games where you have to keep the ball upwards and hit the targets for a high score. It still doesn't have the ball starting shot and still has you moving the ball and then dropping it. All three of the pinball games are varied with their own theme, one table is set in a forest, second table is set in a cave while the third and last one is set outside the dungeon where Scott imprisoned the party. The pinball games aren't too bad but the ball tends to get stuck near the flippers which is a bug and causes you to lose one of your lives and that can be annoying. Still much like the Project Summer Ice Bowling Pinball games it only takes a couple of seconds of playing to get the highscore which will grant you an easy platinum trophy and if you do all three of them that's three easy platinum trophies that you'll get without much effort.
Which is best & worst?
Out of all of the Project Summer Ice games that are released on PlayStation 4 My First Date RPG is the worst because it literally has nothing that really makes an RPG whereas Our Church and Halloween RPG is the best of them all. It has a decent premise, the turn based combat is basic but it has an RPG system in there...well kind of. Our Church and Halloween also runs smooth, has the looks of an old black and white gameplay game and I like the pinball games it has as well as they have more variety than the ones in the Bowling series.
Conclusion
So with that series done we reached the end of the overview of the Project Summer Ice games released on PlayStation 4. There are maybe other games I could have talked about that are only on PC and/or Xbox consoles at the moment like the Project Summer Ice Basketball, Project Summer Ice Drom Designer and a couple of others but I only wanted to cover the games that are currently released on PlayStation 4. Hopefully with this blog I would have given you a basic look into what these games are and should also spare you the decision of wasting money on these games even if they cost £0.79 each for any of the forty-two games that are released on PlayStation Store. Then if you understand that all of these games including all of the other games from Breakthrough Gaming are just piles of shovelware trash made for quick and easy platinum trophies than really you got yourself forty-two super fast and easy platinum trophies that you unlocked without any meaningful effort.
I would not recommend any of these games at all, they are all not very good with the exception of Our Church and Halloween RPG because at the very least there is some quality to be had with it. It's not very good don't get me wrong but the fact it tries to be more RPG based and have a decent story and presentation makes it above the other games in the Project Summer Ice games. I will at least look forward to seeing the storyline finally concluding if Breakthrough Gaming can get on with that. Till then it is best to avoid playing these games and spending your money on a discount sale of better more worthwhile games.
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