I'd been interested by some of the screen shots and video snippits of P.N.03 for a while, so when I saw it at 50% off in a post-xmas sale, I snapped it up. That it was 50% should have been a bit of a clue.

I'm sure many people will find it a fine game. The graphics are very nice, the music has style, the fact that the lead character seems more concerned with tapping her foot to the music than dodging incoming fire certainly earns it points, but in the end it's basically a futuristic Tomb Raider with more gameplay and camera problems than the original.

It's a third-person platformer with fewer platforms and more shooting than you might expect from anything inspired by Tomb Raider. One review made me think it was pretty much on rails like Panzer Dragoon, but you are free to move around the limited environment.

The game is done room-by room. Half the time when you step into a new room you're immediately in harm's way. If you step, or are knocked, backwards into the wall, the camera pretty much chokes, giving you absolutely no idea of the movement options for your character. You can move the camera around, but only to three or four preset positions, many of which appear to be designed specifically to make it difficult to see who's shooting at you.

But my main gripe is that you can shoot OR move, not both at the same time. This really ruins the flow of the game and results in you being almost guaranteed to get hit in a busy situation. Add to that that the "power moves" are activated with a Street-Fighter style combo move that just doesn't appear to register nearly as often as it should and you find your character just standing there waiting to be shot way too often for it to be fun.

There are power-ups you can buy, power suits with extra moves to be unlocked. A bunch of equipment to play with as you earn points through the game. A more natural evolution that the player didn't have to concern themselves with probably would have be more enjoyable.

If I find a god-mode cheat for this game I will almost certainly go through it, but the 3D environments and enemies are just that bit too repetitive for me to want to suffer through them time and again as I wrestle with the controls. The first time I died I was trying to adjust the camera -- that's not a good sign.

Recommended: No