With its release date fast approaching, Konami's upcoming cybernetic hack-and-slash action game, Nano Breaker, is nearing completion. The game is the brainchild of Koji Igarashi, the man behind the last several installments in the Castlevania series, and that influence certainly shows in the action. We recently had an opportunity to take a quick look at a near-complete build of Nano Breaker, and took in a few early sections of the game. What we found was a fast and frenetic action game with some interesting ideas.

　　The game's lengthy opening cinematic sets the stage. A narrator tells of a special government research project being held on a remote island to investigate the previously untapped potential of nanotechnology. Just in case you aren't a big sci-fi fiend or haven't studied robotics, the field of nanotechnology revolves around microscopic robots that can be used for an almost limitless number of tasks. However, as seems to be the case with all the government-run experiments of this nature, something goes horribly wrong. All the nanomachines on the island suddenly go haywire, including the ones that had been injected into the inhabitants of the island. From there, things get gruesome. We're treated to scenes of people going all robot-zombie, puking blood, and eventually morphing into horrible half organic, half mechanized creatures called, aptly enough, orgamechs. Soldiers try to stop these orgamechs, but are promptly torn apart, limb from limb.

　　As you can imagine, this scenario does not sit well with the military. A new plan is concocted to stop the orgamechs before they head toward the mainland. This new plan involves the game's protagonist, Jake Warren. Though it isn't fully revealed who you are during this scene, it is implied that Jake is some form of cyborg soldier who had been put into "deep freeze" for several years after killing a lot of innocent people. But, hey, when there's only one man (or cyborg) who can do the job, it's easy to forget about stuff like mass murder. And with that, Jake is promptly sent to the island to hack his way through the masses of orgamechs.

　　The game itself seems to play like a mix between the most recent Castlevania games and last year's Bujingai: The Forsaken City. Jake is armed with some manner of crazy cybernetic blade that can actually morph into different blade types to perform different combos. At the start of the game, you may find yourself hitting a lot of the same three-hit combos over and over again, while just using the two main attack buttons. However, if you press and hold the R1 button while attacking, you'll start throwing down some much slower but much more powerful maneuvers, like juggle moves and thrust attacks. There's even a whip move you can use to grab small enemies and pull them toward you.

　　You'll also gain special combo chips while playing. These chips can be used to create new combo types, as well as new blade forms for Jake. For example, the first combo we earned allowed us to basically slice enemies in half using a large axe, which came in handy against the first miniboss, who looked like some sort of bizarre, mechanized Venus flytrap and, while not terribly difficult, still couldn't be finished off without this maneuver. Later, this combo became especially useful against the hordes of grunt orgamechs that continually popped up.

　　While the combos certainly seem to add some depth to the action, the fact is, this is a very stylized and gory action game. Each time you lay into an orgamech with your sword, huge spurts of what looks like blood come flying out. Technically, this "blood" is supposed to actually be machine oil, but no matter what you call it, the end result of each battle still resembles the end of the climactic fight scene at the House of Blue Leaves in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, with a whole lot of red mess spilled all over the place. The really kooky part is that the game actually measures how much blood/oil you leave on the ground, and by hitting certain gallon marks, you'll earn things like life bonuses.

　　The basic layout of each level we played seemed to lean more toward the linear side of things. There were no real exploratory elements, save for a few extra corridors here and there that housed power-ups, and, to be honest, the level designs just didn't seem all that detailed. However, there are other areas of the visuals that make up for the less-than-impressive environments. Namely, the character models all seemed to have a really nice look to them. The orgamechs look like an orgy between man and machine gone horribly awry, and even Jake himself has a fairly badass look going on, with a big, honking mechanized body that could either be a suit of armor or his actual limbs. He doesn't seem to have the most personality in the world (at least, not in the cutscenes we saw), but then, he is a cyborg, and he at least looks pretty cool.

　　From what we've seen of Nano Breaker thus far, it doesn't seem like it's going to revolutionize the hack-and-slash genre, but that hardly means that it won't be any fun. The combo system appears to have the potential to really be quite entertaining, and, frankly, we never got tired of watching those crazy oil spurts fly as we sliced through the vile orgamechs. We'll bring you a far more in-depth opinion of the game when our full review surfaces right around the time of the game's February release.