Pursuit Force (PSP)
Police chases ripped straight from action movies can seem like an exciting prospect for a game, and Pursuit Force sounds like at first it will lean into the thrill of running criminals off the road. It tosses in some boat chases, a few on foot gun fights, and even some time spent on a helicopter’s mounted gun, but games like the 2012 Spy Hunter reboot show that sometimes fast cars can be cheap thrills. Pursuit Force has one idea in its pocket though that elevates it beyond being a driving game that merely looks exhilarating, and that’s its hijacking mechanic.
When you’re out trying to foil the criminal gangs of Capital State in this PSP action game, you have two health bars you need to watch to survive. One ties to the police officer you’re playing as, this special member of a newly formed Pursuit Force unit to curb the reign of five gangs across the city thankfully having regenerating health but with a few conditions. While on foot he needs to be still for it to start recovering and while driving he needs to avoid collisions, the time it takes for it to start recovering a bit lengthy and its recovery rate slow enough that you can’t just wait out danger, especially since many missions are races to stop criminals before they reach their destination. Where things get more exciting though is the fact your vehicle has a health bar. By taking violent action like ramming criminals or shooting them you can gain energy for a meter that allows for an instant heal to yourself and your ride, but much of the time on a mission, you’ll actually need to abandon the vehicle you start in and leap to new rides to stay in the game. Civilians seem pretty content to hand the wheel over to you, but leap onto the car of a criminal and you’ll have to risk your officer’s life to take them out quickly and commandeer their ride.
Vehicle hopping ends up the most electrifying part of a mission in Pursuit Force because it is not only a way to keep in the game, but it’s a strategic consideration. The only way to get new guns beyond your police pistols is by leaping onto a gang member’s car and taking them out, the interaction quick but potentially dangerous based on what they’re packing. Leap onto a car packed with goons and your number is probably up, especially if one packs a shotgun. You can open fire on their vehicle before making the jump, but that will mean it’s weaker when it’s in your hands. The same energy bar that fills up to heal you or a vehicle though can be spent instead to do a slow motion jump between cars, allowing you to aim and fire at the drivers and any gunmen so the hijacking is easier to complete safely. Some missions require you to steal vehicles loaded with priceless goods while others hijacking can sometimes be the faster way of taking out a target than trying to open fire on them with your guns, but figuring out the balance on when to jump and when to eliminate the enemy with firepower keeps the missions exciting and makes up for the driving that is so clean and responsive that it poses little challenge on its own.
Leaping to another vehicle requires you to press the right button when a symbol appears on screen, and sometimes making that symbol appear is a bit tougher than you’d think. Most of the time if you’re going at the same pace near a desired target it will crop up, but the leniency wavers, especially since the game seems to not prioritize the option for civilian vehicles much perhaps in an attempt to avoid the symbol appearing too often. It’s much easier to trigger a jump to another car or boat when there are gang members in them, but if your car is about to blow and you’re desperate for a ride, it can feel like the game is struggling to detect a civilian vehicle even if you’re rubbing up against it. This will likely only be a huge issue in the game’s boss battles where gang leaders pack powerful weapons that can wipe out a ride’s health rapidly, but these boss battles also include an interesting risk-reward element as well. The energy meter you can use for healing is known as the Justice Meter, and when it’s full, you deal more damage. Bosses almost require you to take the gamble of having full Justice Meter to take out their hefty health bar before they can make their escape, but this will mean you won’t want to spend your energy on healing or slow-motion hijacking, and what’s more, the bar will deplete some if you hit a civilian’s vehicle, meaning there is at least something to watch out for despite the driving being straightforward.
Boat driving is a bit less responsive to match the vehicle type, but the hijacking being maintained in that form of play still ends up feeling important to spicing up the action. It is less common than normal driving across the game’s 30 mission Career mode, but it is a nice diversion as is the way the game segments its mission types into batches of 5. There are five gangs that have turned Capital State into a crime-riddled hot zone where the police had little hope of protecting the populace before the Pursuit Force and their specialized vehicles and officers stepped in. Some of the gangs are expected or reasonable ideas for villains, the Capelli crime family your typical mafiosos and the Convicts made up of prison escapees eager to get their revenge. On the other hand, the Vixens are a group of gem thieves whose theme seems to be that they’re women, and the Killer66 feel less like a yakuza pastiche and more like many ideas about Japanese culture thrown together into one gang. The Warlords though are perhaps the best example of why which gang you’re facing in a mission matters, because the Warlords have stolen military equipment and that means any mission involving them can involve heavy duty firearms. Each gang has their own weaponry and their focus can lead to more specific types of play like how the Vixens often have more focus on you stealing their vehicles to complete a job while the Killer66 have a lot more on-foot firefights to work through. Even within a gang’s set of missions though you can get things like needing to protect a hostage where you can’t do the car leaping for a change and things like an indestructible car chasing you introduce some shake-ups so your hijacking antics won’t always be the answer to overcoming tough opponents.
On foot firefights and manning the chain gun turret in the helicopter are admittedly the simplest types of play on offer and crop up less often than the others. They are often just a portion of a bigger mission at least and a good spot for the game to slap a checkpoint down, the player not always needing to start a mission from the beginning if they fail even if many of them are fairly fast. The minigun manning is just a matter of pointing and shooting although there are at least incoming attacks to shoot down and the need to avoid innocents with your fire, but the on foot gun missions vary. Sometimes it can be very easy to just hold the lock-on button and fire constantly, this firing type found when in a vehicle as well but it makes more sense you have such aiming allowances when racing in fast vehicles where free aim could be hard to line up. You can approach criminals on foot and arrest them instead to take their gun though that does mirror why hijacking works, the player again needing to endanger themselves and most gang members will push in and engage if you are trying to hang back and wait for the automatic healing.
The 30 mission career mode that spreads out what order you tackle the gangs in based on how the level unlocks are staggered already feels like it executes on the game’s concepts well, but there are two additional modes and ones that focus in more on the driving while upping the difficulty to account for it. The Races aren’t as simple as they sound, each one having a little story framing and forcing you into a specific vehicle for it. You’re not trying to clear laps or even at a starting line in the Race mode, the other drivers already out and ahead of you and you need to catch up and pass them before reaching the end of the road. Some of these are just tests of your driving ability against opponents who can take some of the game’s tighter turns without losing much speed, but others can introduce extra effects like one framed as a race for an antidote where your driver will sometimes have their vision blur to mess with your driving. Time Trial mode ends up being the rare place where the game is purely focused on speed, different stretches from the game’s locations turned into races against the clock with only traffic and turns to worry about. Capital State does have a good range of locations like a beach side city and the snowy heights, but the roads definitely feel more alive when you’re fighting deadly foes instead of just aiming to clear a course in a set time.
THE VERDICT: Pursuit Force keeps the driving part easy so it can make the actual combat with Capital State’s gangs the adrenaline-pumping car-hopping centerpiece. Race and Time Trial mode are decent extras but in the Career, Pursuit Force concocts many different situations that ask for on the fly risk taking and interesting judgment calls, even the healing tied to a system where you might want to avoid spending energy so you can keep the strength boost it provides. The game’s dabbling in on-foot and helicopter segments are simpler but not overly present, instead allowing the high octane battles in boats and cars to keep the thrills coming and with a good range of mission objectives to keep the excitement alive.
And so, I give Pursuit Force for PlayStation Portable…
A GOOD rating. Pursuit Force’s box knows to show the car leaping action that is so key to keeping its action energetic, involved, and unique, the right allowances made to encourage the hijacking mechanic without it breaking open the game’s difficulty. You don’t need to worry too much about driving well outside of some select spots and things like Race mode, so you can focus in on knocking other cars off the road or taking them out by climbing aboard. However, tougher foes will be able to blast you off if you get careless and just jump from car to car, and missions like the boss battles not only can’t be completed in time if you waste too much of it swapping cars, but the Justice Meter creates an interesting balance you need to manage since you need to stay alive but you also need the benefits it can provide to your fighting ability. The on foot shooting is admittedly more a novelty than a major component to whether the game works or not, and the same could be said about the extra modes, but Pursuit Force seems to understand its greatest strengths and the breaks away from car and boat action feel more like ways to prevent things from blurring together into a constant sequence of vehicle hopping battles.
Shooting down enemy helicopters from the road below, trying to survive the missile-loaded boat of the Warlords’ self-styled General, shaking off gang members that leap onto your car, walking across the top of a semi to take it over… A lot of Pursuit Force’s action definitely sounds thrilling, but having the effective and exciting mechanic of hijacking enemy vehicles while in pursuit integrated so well is where the experience goes from surface level bombast to actual engaging play that makes you want to not just see what shape the action will take next, but be the one pull it off yourself.