Based on the obtuse explanations of CIMA I'd been reading since its release (in 2003), I thought it was a tactical RPG with a puzzle twist. In fact, it's a puzzle game with an action twist. Also, it's terrible.

The plot is that you're protecting a bunch of hapless civilians from the CIMA, which are either aliens, or monsters, or an organization of alien monsters, or, actually I don't really know. But they terrify the people, and it's your job to keep them safe. By helping them to dungeon exits. This game is nothing but escort missions. Amazing.

The game starts on a train passing through the countryside. Luckily there aren't any CIMA out here-- wait! It's a CIMA portal! Fiddlesticks. So a portal transports you into the alien dungeon world. The CIMA apparently control spacetime and, well, frankly I don't understand what the point of resisting them is. Oh! It's because the CIMA feed on hope, and so to foster that hope in their victims, they always create an opportunity for escape. Yeah, that seems ... right.

The dungeons themselves are isometric puzzles. Your character, and another one that follows you, can attack. The civilians can't; you just order them around, between safe spots, toward the exit. Meanwhile you have to hit switches and defeat enemies and stuff, to clear routes for the civvies.

Presumably the gameplay gets a little more complicated later in the game, but I really don't care about that, for two reasons.

1) The pathfinding is retarded. If you order the civilians to walk from one area to another, and if they can't go in a straight line, they will get stuck. Your partner will get stuck behind things, too. Wow.

2) There are 14 of these douchebags, and ordering them individually just doesn't fucking work. The selection menu allows you to either select ALL of them, or one at a time, based on miniature icons of their heads, many of which look quite similar. And most of them are disabled at any given time, because of a fucking stupid 'group' organization mechanism that doesn't make any sense to me.

So you order these idiots to walk to the next safe spot, while you attend to repelling monsters (read: pressing the A button over and over). Some of them get caught behind a wall. You go back to get them, but ordering them individually is almost impossible. And the act of moving to them screws up the route again. And they walk incredibly slow.

It's neat, I guess, that the game doesn't really resemble anything else out there. But that doesn't really excuse the fact that the core mechanics are mediocre to begin with, and the control issues make it unplayable. I guess there's a reason this game faded into total obscurity.