P.N. 03 (Product Number 03)

Not what you think

First thing's first; it isn't an MGS clone, it isn't a tediously executed third person shoot 'em up like Gungrave, and it isn't Tomb Raider in space. In fact, it's got more in common with hard as nails vertical shoot 'em ups like Ikaruga, demanding a steady stream of munitions and outright evasion of enemy fire, rather than extensive shielding. Admittedly, we haven't got our heads around every last detail - there are still a few enemies that seem hard to the point of being unbalanced, which there must be some intangible knack to beating (probably explained in patronising tones on the first page of the Japanese-only manual) - and as a result we can't be sure we've uncovered all the main abilities, but from what we've seen so far, that's how the game works.

Your character Vanessa, the slender, pale-skinned brunette in the screenshots, enters each level with a full complement of health (green bar) and energy (orange), and begins the game with three lives (continues, whatever), of which more can be bought or picked up in certain areas. Each level is split into a series of rooms, which serve as small, self-contained challenges, with a variety of enemies, or laser beam obstacles, and a door somewhere at the other end. Sometimes you have to kill all the enemies in the room to unlock the door, and sometimes you don't. Sometimes they drop pick-ups to rejuvenate your health and energy supplies, and sometimes they don't. Whatever happens, when you get to the door and smack A, you're treated to a rundown of how you did - how many of the level's rooms you've conquered, your time, and how many enemies were dispatched, and you're rewarded with points based on your performance and whether you made it through unscathed. These points can be spent on reinforcing yourself with suit upgrades, munitions, continues and even entirely new suits through mid-level teleports and between levels.

They're firing sir, they're firing!

Hang on, you're probably thinking. So you have to click through a score screen after every single room? Yes, even the ones that don't include enemies - like the entry point for each level, rooms exclusively comprised of laser obstacles, and the power-up-packed corridors preceding each end-of-level boss battle - but before long you'll be thankful for the respite each blackened point-totaller affords you. That's because P.N.03 is hard. Hard as an elephant's foot.

The combat itself consists of your staccato laser attacks, their staccato laser attacks, your special attacks, their special attacks (like big, instant-kill laser beams) and all the movement in-between. Special attacks can be projectile based, or close-range whirlwind-style affairs, and these vary depending on your suit and what you've bought - they require SFII-style button combos to activate though, which is a nice touch. Most rooms offer some sort of battlement, wall or barrier to duck behind, and you're often forced to make a split-second decision where to hide as you waltz in to find several guns trained on you only seconds before they open fire. When you're capable of getting your own back, you can use L or R to sidestep (tap) and cartwheel (double-tap) into space, from whence you can loose a volley of ammo with A , but - and here's the killer - you can't move while you fire. A crazy restriction? No, cunningly. It's actually an absolute must for the gameplay to work at all.

You see, although you can jump around like a platform diva (B), somersaulting forwards and backwards to avoid laser fire and rockets, and sidestep/strafe all over the place, the idea is to get your shots off between enemy attacks, to strategically position yourself to avoid being hit by one enemy while you take on another, and to generally take advantage of your environment and dissect the problems and solutions it presents from room to room. It's not restrictive; it's bloody genius. And what's more, you have to do it apace - points definitely mean prizes in P.N.03, and you'll have to get some combos going to maximise those points. Each enemy that dies gives you a certain amount of time in seconds (noted in the top right of the screen) to kill another and, thus, add a hit to the combo. Simple, effective, and tempting enough to have you risk life and limb regularly.

Whoops

There are of course pitfalls we've encountered, like a bit of questionable collision detection (slanted corners which you should be able to jump over, etc), but any quirks are mostly understandable. The thing that will get most people down though is the fact that, for some reason, we're not dealing with full analogue control, but a Resident Evil-esque system. Now, we do hesitate to say that, because in practise it's really not that bad, but it's a relatively close comparison. The game lets you race around like any old 3D platform game as long as you're going forwards, see, and you can pirouette backwards to avoid fire by tugging the stick towards you, and spin 180 degrees to take off in the other direction with Z.

OK, there are times (like the boss at the end of the second level), where it would be a blessing to be able to rush back towards the camera without all this Z nonsense, and occasionally you think you're running to the left or right and you pull the stick too close to you, forcing Vanessa to pirouette unhelpfully, but for the most part it's a good system - and it eliminates camera issues. Really. We honestly hadn't even thought about the camera until we hit this paragraph, and that's the mark of a good third person action game.

And that's what P.N.03 is, really: a good third person action game. There are some very sensible design decisions at work, like the way you get a finite amount of continues, and have to pay for more, but you only have to restart an entire level if you run out of them. Otherwise, you just restart the room you were on - leading to a intense feeling of satisfaction if you manage to make it through a really tough one with only a sliver of health surviving, because it's not just worthless sight-seeing unless you're already down to your last continue.

Good, clean fun

What's more, the game looks lovely. Those screenshots don't offer the best portrayal, really. Vanessa is beautifully designed and animated. Each of her suits is detailed down to the slightest detail, like the weird metal rods attached to her back, and the way her hair dances around as she leaps, gazelle-like through the air. Our only concern here is that she sometimes looks almost too agile - but as a sci-fi creation she's fairly believable, and each of her moves is intricately realised.

Her enemies, meanwhile, won't worry the battle droids in Star Wars or anything, but they're very clear, offering you plenty of visual clues as to their next move (be it laser, rocket, forward thrust, etc), and although there isn't a huge amount of variety, you can't really see where that would be applied anyway. Each enemy is more like a nasty from a vertical shooter, and there's a definite "cripes, one of those" to many of them. The best and most satisfying thing about them (for a number of reasons) is their destruction and subsequent distribution all over the floor. In pieces.

As for the game's environments; the whitewashed approach is somewhat reminiscent of the cloning facility in Star Wars Episode II, if you've seen that - very polished, sparsely but lovingly detailed, and built to emphasize the creatures and robots inside it, rather than incidental detail strewn all over the walls. Capcom clearly wanted to ease the player's progress, instead of saturating us with detail - something we already know it can do on the GameCube. It's a different kind of beauty to, say, Resident Evil, but it's beautiful all the same. A bit like Rez (ooh).

Final Product

As you can probably tell, we're very excited about P.N.03. We'd like to get our hands on some US code, for sure, just so we can find out what the story's about and why it's called Product Number 03. As for our thoughts on the Japanese release - it isn't startlingly original, but it can be dashingly beautiful, and as with all of our most recent hardcore gaming icons - ICO, Rez, etc - it's the composition - the subtle blend of gameplay styles and ideas - that fuels its strengths. We can see it getting panned in reviews for various reasons, and we'd certainly have to level some criticisms ourselves (not least of all at the occasional slowdown), but it's very hardcore, and very Capcom, and you should certainly keep an eye on it.