CIMA: The Enemy

Screenshots

Notes

I've given up on CIMA: The Enemy without finishing it, even though I don't have a really good excuse. The game is story driven etc. However, after making essentially no progress after a month and a half, I've given up on it so I can continue with the challenge. This was just because the game is really unenjoyable and I've failed to find the motivation to play it. Here's my review based on the first (roughly I think) quarter that I got through:


I'll start with the positive. CIMA: The Enemy has pretty unique gameplay, a mix of action-RPG and RTS elements. It seems like they were trying to make something original, and that's something to be admired. It's just that it was a bad idea, poorly executed. The graphics also seemed solid, with new background tilesets showing up in every dungeon.


The core premise of CIMA is that you play Ark, a "Gate Guardian". Ark and a group of human settlers have been kidnapped by the CIMA, a mysterious (or possibly just poorly explained) alien group who apparently get sustenance by causing humans to despair. Ark has to guide the gang out of a dungeon they've been placed in, which must have a possibility of escape to ensure the humans remain hopefully as long as possible. Or something. This is at least an attempt to explain why the powerful CIMA have set up this elaborate dungeon and then attack one at a time in strict order of increasing power.

The actual game plays out like this: on each floor of the dungeon you control Ark, who can walk around fighting monsters and flipping switches, all the usual ARPG stuff. The twist is he must guide the settlers out. They are controlled by RTS like controls, setting waypoints for them. Sometimes you have to use them to weigh down switches or access areas you can't reach personally. The problem is you have to constantly hold their hands and protect them from infinitely respawning monsters.

It's essentially one long escort mission. For the whole game. With up to 14 people to shepherd around (mostly in groups of 4, although sometimes you'll need to handle them individually).

And to cap it all, there's no pathfinding. At all. You have to manually set waypoints for everyone to follow, setting the path around corners and obstacles. If you set it up so they even slightly clip a corner, they'll just get stuck forever until you redo the path to clear the corner properly. This is incredibly frustrating. The same problem even applies to the companion character who just follows your player character around. When you walk around a corner, she can get stuck on it and glitch out, unable to follow. Note that in any decently made game she would just teleport back to you after you get too far away, but here she stays stuck forever. And if you don't have everyone in the exit room you can't advance to the next level.

Fighting regular enemies is just button mashing. Enemies pop out of nowhere making the main problem just reacting to them, and not accidentally sending your units to any empty space you haven't checked out first. Fighting bosses on the other hand, the main difficulty is that they all run around super fast and run into you, causing damage. Their actual attacks are usually not much of a problem.


Each character has an individual (and small inventory). Most of the time it's your player character picking everything up, so you have to micromanage distributing items to everyone to keep his inventory space freed up. Almost all items except health items and upgrade materials seemed pretty useless anyway. There's a crafting system, which relies on materials farmed from enemies, and having a good relationship with the party members (which is raised by not letting them get hit and killing enemies near them). This seemed shallow and grindy.

There's just nothing fun in this game. Every aspect conspires to make it more annoying and repetitive. I have no idea how it managed to get a score of 70 to end up on the list (even though it only just made it on).