Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice (PSP)
Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice had a ridiculous act to follow. The original Pursuit Force took its police action to some delightful extremes, the player hopping between moving vehicles and shooting down helicopters with hand guns. However, it could also be a very difficult game at times, demanding a strong sense for when to do those leaps between cars and needing to delicately balance a meter that made you much stronger when full but also served as your only option for quick healing. Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice decides to cut away a lot of the strategizing, the game an overall easier play than its predecessor while also a much smoother one. Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice isn’t about the difficulty of the over the top maneuvers you’ll be pulling off against even wilder criminals than before, it’s about the thrill and the spectacle.
Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice takes place after the previous game’s events. The special police team known as Pursuit Force was put together to help rid Capital State of highly organized and dangerous criminal gangs, and with them all behind bars, the Commander of the team is able to relax and marry fellow team member Sarah Hunter. Unfortunately, their wedding is crashed quite literally as familiar foes from the Convicts gang storm the event, and they’re not the only gang back in action. The Convicts are joined by other familiar groups like the Warlords and new faces like the British Syndicate, and together they start a surprisingly organized attack that escalates the stakes far beyond usual police problems like robberies and hostage situations. In fact, thanks to a lot of Soviet hardware entering their hands, the criminals have expanded their acts of terrorism to include even trying to set off nuclear devices, but all of this does seem to be mostly in service of escalating the stakes. Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice wants to get to the point you can try to run from an expanding poison cloud in a boat or try to take out someone while fighting atop a plane, so naturally the opposition has to be able to pull out wilder tools to keep providing new exhilarating dangers. There is an attempt to make more of a story out of this battle against these allied criminals too, a new police group called Viper Squad often butting in to steal Pursuit Force’s thunder, although there’s also an unfortunate undercurrent that the members of your team believe justice is often best dealt with a lethal shot. This isn’t something the game is examining, it more part of the raucous embrace of violence and vehicles, but when there’s more than one mission where you interrogate a guy by strapping him to the front of your car and making him think he’ll die thanks to your reckless driving, it can feel like the game’s not sure where to draw the line.
While Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice is definitely defined by the moments where it gets the most imaginative with the kind of situations you find yourself in, there is still a firm base that makes up most of this action game’s play. Most of your time will be spent behind the wheel of a vehicle, cars and bikes common but the occasional boat or hovercraft mission crop up along the way as well. Driving is a bit harder in an aquatic vehicle, but otherwise you can often weave through traffic with ease while chasing perps, a large focus put on takedowns and taking cars to clear missions. The Commander has a reliable handgun that’s easy to hit nearby targets with and ramming can help throw off enemy drivers, but leaping over to another vehicle to commandeer it plays a big part in all your missions. Sometimes you have to do it because the target car is carrying sensitive materials you need to protect, but other times it can just be a better way to take out some pesky criminals and even pilfer their firearms in the process. Shooting down a helicopter is something that can be done across multiple missions in the campaign, and it’s certainly much easier with a pilfered machine gun or magnum than your standard pistol.
Both the Commander and his current vehicle can be worn down by the enemy though, another reason for car hopping being to get to something that isn’t on the verge of exploding. However, if you do need to heal yourself or vehicle, there is a Justice meter that fills up when you do things like take out criminals or destroy their vehicles that can help you out. Press triangle when you even have a bit of Justice in the meter and you can trade it in for quick health refills instead, this leading to one potential strategy where you can let your car get heavily worn down but keep it alive by just funneling tiny bits of Justice into it as needed to avoid it blowing up. This is one way Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice can feel a bit too easy, but there are still other benefits to the Justice meter that may mean you don’t always drain it for health when you can. A full meter not only lets you do a slow-motion jump between vehicles where you can shoot down gunmen with ease but it also boosts your strength and speed so long as that meter remains full. Its use for easy healing still feels a bit too valuable that you don’t need to be very strategic in holding onto some Justice power and most missions don’t have moments where you’d need its special boost to succeed.
The campaign in Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice does feature some other sections that break away from leaping between vehicles. Sometimes you’ll be manning a turret in a helicopter or sniping perps from a perch, and there are even some crazier scenarios where you’re climbing aboard some massive war machine, gradually moving between dangerous parts of the sometimes ridiculous shapes these enormous imagined vehicles take. Other times though you’ll be on foot, needing to utilize cover as you fire at criminals with only your own health at risk. You can arrest enemies during these segments if you approach them and quickly press the displayed buttons. Much like the vehicle missions, the objectives for these section can change into things like protection missions, and because Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice explores so many different ideas and types of play, it never really loses its novelty. The kinks have been ironed out since the first game, and while that sanded off some of the edges when it comes to providing danger that truly tests your abilities, it’s also easier to appreciate the situations you find yourself in. You still need to work to succeed as well, you’re certainly not invincible and extra considerations during a mission can sometimes make you have to shake up how you approach an objective, but the impressive spectacle of a moment isn’t lost since you won’t get stuck trying to figure it out rather than appreciating the wild idea at play.
There are a few extra modes to tackle after the story too, although mostly they’re taking the thrilling base of story mode missions and adding some extra twist or difficulty to it. The multiplayer mode will essentially take mission types from the campaign and turn them into competitions, so you’ll have things like one player serving as the criminals trying to make a get away while the other is the police officer trying to capture their cars, both sides reviving as often as needed so not only is it more about the chase, but the game doesn’t need to put away any of its over the top action to craft this mode. Bounty mode is a single player option that essentially aims to grade you for how well you do at a story mission while challenges will cut out chunks of a level and retool them with specific conditions like limiting your attack options to only vehicle rams or removing the ability to heal with your Justice meter. The extra solo play modes can seem a little less imaginative because of their limited ambition in design but they still are a bit more demanding than the story mode if you’re aching for some action that makes the wild feats of the Pursuit Force feel a little more in line with how difficult they would be to achieve.
THE VERDICT: Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice has so many wild directions it wishes to take its police action that it doesn’t spend too much time trying to make it difficult to see the next over the top idea. The foundational vehicle play is solid and enjoyable, the car leaping mechanic a bit absurd but a great way to energize chases, and those chases never get old either because of the wild new scenarios you find yourself in or the frequent shift to other formats like on-foot shooting. Healing comes a little too easily but is balanced out well by objectives that extend beyond your own survival, Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice interested in keeping you in the moment and appreciating the adrenaline-packed action that keeps escalating in new entertaining ways.
And so, I give Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice for PlayStation Portable…
A GOOD rating. There are many areas where Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice is an undeniable improvement over the original. Vehicle hopping is much easier to set up reliably, your Justice meter doesn’t take too much of a hit from accidentally running into civilian cars, and there are small ideas like a gradual upgrade system across a more structured story that put it over its predecessor. However, it also misses those nail-biting moments from the first game that were difficult but also rewarding when you finally figured out the way to overcome a tough mission. Challenge mode can hit that level at times, but the campaign does feel like it needs more bite to match the bombast. Usually if something is as strong as it looks it’s because it’s an instant kill but still one you can dodge well enough thanks to the warning alerts, but Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice could have been more difficult without being quite as demanding as the original. The car healing trick where you always keep it just a smidgen above the explosion threshold feels like it could have been prevented by there being a point of no return, but otherwise it just feels like a bit more faith in the player would be warranted. A bit more enemy aggression could spice up many sections of the game, but thankfully Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice does often whip out other considerations that do at least put you in proper danger. Needing to handle a large group of enemies while they’re whittling down the health of an ally or structure means you do need to think a bit more about how you prioritize your attack efforts, and concepts like needing to keep a man’s heart rate down with safer driving while also under attack from all sides do ensure there are moments you can’t just power through with gunfire and car hopping.
Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice is a thrill ride, and few people get off a rollercoaster and complain it wasn’t cerebral enough. Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice wants to keep you moving onto the next new exciting battle style it’s cooked up where the vehicles involved and the enemy weapons keep escalating, happily leaving realism behind to chase new ideas. However, it does at least keep itself from going overboard by integrating other objectives so you’ll still be engaged while playing, Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice caring first and foremost about spectacle but doesn’t forget its brand of wild police action is more exhilarating if you’re playing an important part in helping it unfold.