P.N. 03 is the latest third-person action game starring the sexy gaming heroine of the week…or is it? Though it’s not immediately apparent from screenshots or even video, this game is trying desperately to be a hardcore shooter underneath all that gloss and lipstick.

In fact, P.N. 03 has a lot in common with Rare’s Jet Force Gemini or Kemco’s Winback. You run through corridors and large, open rooms, shooting enemy robots from afar and hiding behind corners and other obstructions for cover. And like its brethren, this game has rather strange controls that you’ll either love or hate, though they aren’t responsive enough either way. There’s certainly an amount of thrill to be had from facing two or three deadly enemies in an open room, with only your reflexes and knowledge of AI patterns for protection. Unfortunately, P.N. 03 has very little to offer outside of this simple gameplay scheme.

The main character is Vanessa, a “freelance mercenary” hired to clean out a military installation overrun with security robots gone haywire. The premise is generic enough that you could easily overlook it, except that the game throws in conspicuous text conversations between Vanessa and her unseen employer, in which the two banter around like sassy eighth-grade schoolgirls vying for dominance on the playground. The dialogue is rather embarrassing and hardly lends any gravity to the already insane scenario of a stripper-ballerina twirling her way around lasers and guided missiles.

Vanessa is constantly dancing and jiggling around, but P.N. 03 is by no means a dancing game, nor does it even have anything to do with music. It fits into the rather uncommon third-person shooter genre; the proper way to play is by standing in one place and shooting the far-off enemies until they are all gone, at which point you run up to the next room and repeat the process. Third-person games, shooters in particular, usually have some camera issues…that is certainly the case with P.N. 03. The main problem is that the camera is zoomed in too far, so you are always seeing too much of Vanessa’s gyrating antics and not enough of what’s going on around her. The very limited camera adjustment options don’t alleviate the situation, either.

Repetitive and shallow though they may be, the shooting parts of the game are actually engaging and usually challenging, in a brainless and purely visceral sense. An auto-aim feature is turned on all the time, so you can concentrate on watching enemy patterns and dodging at the right moment. The system works, but an option to aim manually would have been appreciated, as the automatic mode sometimes won’t detect enemies near the edge of the screen, and cycling through the available targets can be very distracting in crowded rooms. As in any self-respecting shooter, there is a combo system which awards you bonus points for killing several enemies in quick succession, but you rarely get an opportunity to pull off a really nice combo. Unlike in combo-heavy games like Ikaruga, the number and patterns of enemies are usually not conducive to putting together long chains. In most cases, there just aren’t enough enemies spawned to make a combo worth striving for, and the counter resets when you enter another room.

There are eleven main missions and about half as many environments, but only a couple of them are distinctive in any way, namely a prologue and one later level which take place outside. The levels are split into rooms and corridors and are generally pretty short. They also happen to be smothered in health refills and continues, so as long as you’re patient and have decent dodging reflexes, you can play straight through quite quickly. However, if you want to buy new suits and upgrades for Vanessa’s abilities (and you’ll probably need to buy a few just to keep progressing), you’ll have to play through the Trial Missions. These are levels randomly generated from rooms you’ve already experienced in the main missions, and they’re the only way to earn enough extra points to buy anything useful from the unnecessarily expensive shop. If you like to upgrade a lot and see the flashy (and occasionally useful) special moves, expect to spend far more time in the Trial Missions than in the real ones. Trudging through these sloppily assembled mazes over and over again just to buy a rapid fire upgrade weighs down the game, yet without the padding, you could burn through the “story” missions in a couple of hours. With both types of missions combined, P.N. 03 becomes respectably lengthy but overly tedious.

If there’s a saving grace, it has to be the bosses. Almost every main level ends with a lengthy battle against some giant, transforming metal monster that would just love to slice you up with its absurdly large laser beams. It’s hard to believe the same development team created such exciting, tense, dynamic boss fights. It’s not uncommon to see a single boss robot undergo two or three metamorphoses during the fight, each time acquiring new weapons and patterns. In the final levels, the bosses become even more complex, and you may find yourself needing that hefty reserve of continues you collected during the rest of the mission.

Despite the excellent bosses and generally strong aesthetics, P.N. 03 is a flawed game in a niche genre for which most gamers won’t have much patience in the first place. Its core gameplay is initially attractive and mildly addictive, but the missions and enemies offer little variety or depth. You might enjoy playing with the different suits and upgrades, but unlocking any of the good stuff requires hours and hours of playing through the bland trial missions. In general, the fun and exciting parts are offset by a lot of frustration and tedium. Rent it first if you’re curious.