Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice (PSP)

Just your average car-hopping, face-shooting action romp.
2/6/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 3

There's something a little bit depressing about calling a game that has you frequently leaping from moving cars and shooting comically absurd bad guys in the face in slow motion a "formula exercise," but that's exactly what Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice is. It's a predictable follow-up to Sony and developer BigBig Studios' PSP hit, Pursuit Force, and it shoots down most of the same targets as its predecessor, albeit in extended fashion.

Sadly, that extension is a widening, not a deepening, of the experience. BigBig has added a number of new play modes and a greater focus on storyline and characters this time around, but hasn't futzed with the core action much beyond adding more on-foot and rail-shooting missions to the mix. That probably wasn't the right way to go, since the crux of Pursuit Force's success was the wildly exciting and over-the-top driving missions. You'll still find plenty of those exciting vehicular moments in this sequel, but don't expect them to offer quite the same level of "wow" factor this time around.

You play as the same nameless action cop as the first Pursuit Force, though now you've got a promotion and a fiancée. The game actually opens with a bunch of rowdy redneck thugs crashing your wedding, and from there it's a long string of bizarre plot twists involving kidnapped nuclear physicists, a rival police agency and more ethnic stereotyping than all of Rob Schneider's film roles put together. (Proper British villains! Skanky rednecks! Russians that call Americans capitalist pigs! Oh my!) While the first Pursuit Force got away with its Saturday morning cartoon silliness, that was because the silliness was only a casual element. The game didn't spend a great deal of time trying to force a god-awful storyline down your throat, something that Extreme Justice very much does. From its miserable attempts at comedy to its love story that feels ripped right out of Guns N' Roses' "November Rain" video, this one tries way, way too hard, and falls flat in the process.

At least the action is still fun -- mostly, anyway. Most of the game's action sequences take place in cars, boats, motorcycles and other forms of vehicular transport, and often you'll find yourself leaping between them as you chase down the bad guys. Leaping to an enemy vehicle and pumping rounds into their stupid, snarling faces is pretty much the game's primary thrill. All you have to do is roll up on an enemy vehicle (random traffic works as well) and wait for a jump icon to appear on screen. Once you do, you'll leap onto the car, and from there you can pump any bad guys full of lead. The thing that makes this so much fun is the rapid-fire pace at which you often find yourself doing this. Missions often provide many different cars that must be vanquished before the stage ends, and you almost always have to kill them all off before they reach a finishing point at the end of the stage, so there's little time to dawdle.

Other missions include rail-shooting sections, where you're either perched inside a helicopter using a mini-gun or using a sniper rifle to take down on-foot enemies. There are also straight-up third-person shooting sequences where you run around, ducking behind objects for cover and blasting away at whatever bad guys happen to be nearby. These were the weakest sequences in the original Pursuit Force, and BigBig didn't do much to improve upon them here. More often than not, you'll simply find yourself running up on a bad guy, which engages a quick button-pressing mini-game where, if you do it successfully, you'll throw down the enemy and put him in cuffs. Do this enough times, and it'll start to feel like one of those bad late-era Steven Segal movies where the bad guys often seem to just be standing around, shooting halfway in his general direction while he waddles up to do some lazy kung-fu move to take them down. It's stupid and terribly dull after a while.