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 fianc?e. 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.

Even the look and feel of the game hasn't changed much since the original Pursuit Force. Granted, the first game was one of the very best-looking games on the PSP, and Extreme Justice is every bit as pretty-looking as its predecessor. It's even a bit cleaner in spots --and uglier in others, such as when the UMD fails to load up a chunk of the level, leaving you driving in empty space for at least a few seconds as it struggles to catch up.

BigBig did at least make a couple of changes to the original game's formula -- some good, some bad. On paper, the addition of new characters to the mix isn't an awful idea, but it's not used to any great effect here. New recruits to the Pursuit Force will accompany you on most missions, but save for the girl who is very good at leaping on enemy cars and killing off the scumbags inside, most of them are pathetically useless. The on-foot cohorts aren't very good at shooting dudes standing three feet away, and any time you're getting helicopter accompaniment, it's impossible to tell whether they're helping or just floating around aimlessly.

More useful than any of those dead-weight cadets is the addition of a justice meter. Players of the first game will recall how angering the game's difficulty could be at times, and the justice meter does a good job of fixing that. Basically, any time you bust a bad guy, blow something evil up, or generally do a good deed, your meter fills up a bit. If you're in the middle of a firefight and either your car or your personal health meter are quickly depleting, you can just hold down the triangle button for a couple of seconds and use whatever justice you've stored up to replenish yourself. If you let the meter build up all the way, you can pull off a nifty little slow-motion leap to an enemy car, which allows you to shoot any baddies occupying the vehicle in midair. If years of modern action games have taught us anything, it's that shooting people in slow motion in midair is awesome. It's scientific fact.

It won't take you more than a handful of hours to best Extreme Justice's story mode (perhaps a bit longer if you opt for the hard difficulty setting), but thankfully, there is more to do. BigBig included a number of standalone challenges through which to play. Bounty mode has you replaying missions from the story for cash to spend on unlockables, and challenge mode does roughly the same thing, but with unique objectives like finishing off missions under specific time limits and avoiding collisions, etc.

Multiplayer comes with a few different modes, including a standard four-player deathmatch and some competitive and cooperative driving modes. The deathmatch isn't much fun, since it's based on the same lame shooting action as the third-person shooter sequences in the story. The driving stuff tends to be more enjoyable, especially survivor mode, which has you and a friend teaming up to drive and man a turret to take down incoming enemies. Too bad it's only for ad-hoc play, as some Internet support probably would have helped the mode's appeal a great deal.

As much as Extreme Justice might seem like a no-brainer to those who loved Pursuit Force, it's not quite such a simple recommendation to make. Yes, the action is still largely exciting, and the visual presentation is terrific, but so much of what makes Extreme Justice fun was precisely what made the original game fun. The newer elements, such as the multiplayer, the added out-of-the-car sequences, and the cheeseball storyline don't really add much to the overall experience, and in some cases actually detract from it. Extreme Justice is certainly worth a look, but don't expect the same level of whiz-bang excitement that you got the first time around.

This review was based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.