CIMA: The Enemy (2003)

CIMA is a game with an interesting enough concept - give orders to 14 pioneers to guide them to safety across a series of dungeons while you whip monsters with swords, but the strategy elements are far too plodding and frustrating and the action too sloppy to really be worth more than a curious look.

On a train ride to the frontier, 14 pioneers look to build a new life while protected by warriors called Gate Guardians. Along the way, a portal sucks their traveling train into a world populated by CIMA, creatures that pull people into dungeons to feed on human hope. Jumping into each dungeon our heroes Ark and Ivy rescue one pioneer at a time and fight each and every CIMA along the way.

The combat system is fairly simple, with isometric movement and single button attacks. Most of the attacking is done with Ark's sword but some characters have projectiles. Most enemies aren't really that much of an issue but boss battles are frustrating and janky in their patterns and often require plenty of potion resources to succeed. There are other items and a "majesty" system where players can craft items based on trust levels with different pioneers (raised by beating CIMA in front of them and decreased when pioneers get hit) but the majority item that the player will usually need is a basic potion.

As for the strategy system, the pioneers are split into a maximum set of 4 camps, with each camp having up to 4 people maximum. The player can assign commands to either everyone at once or members within a single camp. The entire camp has to occupy the same spot in order to switch to other camps for commands, making moving more than 4 people an absolute hassle. Adding to further issue is that the AI in CIMA is incredibly dumb and slow, taking forever to get from place to place and easily getting stuck behind corners and basic obstacles. The player can assign up to three locations in sequence to get around most of these issues but often Ivy or another character will follow directly behind Ark, and those can get stuck even moreso.

That said, the game isn't totally unplayable and has some interesting moments. Players will need to guide pioneers to switches (especially lightweight children), upgrade them so they can fend for themselves in some situations and activate switches. While novel for the first few dungeons, the novelty wears out quickly and the only difference is complexity. There will also almost always be a segment where the gang splits up through some trap and must come together, but this thankfully reduces the more complex sequences later in the game.

Aesthetically the game combines fairly basic looking anime characters with interestingly flavored environments. The environments are mostly just aesthetically different (Fire Dungeon, Strange World, Weakling Forest, etc) with all of the mechanics identical across them. CIMA come in different flavors, from golems to flying fish to all sorts of oddities but are usually a pushover or a nuisance. Music is largely forgettable, with triumphant tunes, the subtle western twang aboard the train hub, and a couple of battle themes. The bosses (janky as they are) can be somewhat nice to look at, especially the final battle.

Past that, there's not a whole lot to say about CIMA. It's definitely not a great game, and squanders its chance to mix exciting action RPG combat with tricky strategy puzzles due to its cumbersome control scheme and sloppy execution. It's playable if you really want to check it out though!

This game tries to mash together an action RPG with RTS elements, where you are directly controlling a hero character with the d-pad while at the same time moving NPC units around a dungeon similar to the way you move units in more typical RTS games. The goal is to protect the NPCs, fight the monsters, and use the NPCs to solve some simple puzzles along the way. Here are my experiences with this game:

--The Good--

I appreciate the attempt to make something new, especially as someone who really enjoys strategy games with RPG elements (in all the different ways you can do that). For the first few minutes I thought it might actually work too. It felt fun and frantic trying to protect the 15 NPC units while still having to make sure they go to the right places. But after just a few minutes it suddenly hit me. This game is just going to be one long series of escort missions, complete with all the game design problems escort missions present.

--The Bad--

I don't mind escorting or defending, at least conceptually. I've had some wonderfully tense moments hovering over an NPC as they pick their way through a gauntlet of hellfire and magic. But games like this are why people generally don't like escort missions. The whole thing is designed in a way that feels sloppy and lazy, where the NPCs you are watching over show no real will to live. You tell them where to go and they go straight there, hardly reacting to any monsters hacking away at them except for a few beeps or scream samples to remind you to do your hero job better.

There are technical problems here too, beyond the simple lack of immersion. The NPCs constantly get caught on corners. They also get caught on scenery. They also get caught on nothing at all, just shuttering to a stop in the middle of a field or open area until you tell them how to get around the single pixel giving them trouble. This takes micro-managing to a new level, with you having to trace relatively complex paths for the NPCs to follow a little bit at a time.

There are other problems with this game too, that I will quickly list. The graphics are too simple. Because they are sprite-based it was hard to gauge the hit boxes for the monsters. Some of the gameplay mechanics, such as item crafting, feel tacked on when they could have spent that time tightening the core gameplay instead. The music is flat and repetitive. And the story doesn't really make sense, though I didn't finish the game so maybe they tie it in a nice neat little bow at the end.

--The Verdict--

I became impatient with this game and gave it up after about 6 hours. A big reason for that was the technical stuff I mentioned above, which only got worse as the level layouts became more complex. The overall blandness of this game's style and design though is really what put the last nail in this coffin. I could have handled the frustration of shepherding the NPCs around the world if this game had any charm to it at all. But there was not a drop to be found.