Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice

Dom Robinson reviews

Pursuit Force: Extreme Justicefor Sony PSPDistributed by
Sony

• Price: £24.99
• Players: 1
• Widescreen: Yes

Following up the original game, Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice is wonderful. In fact, it’s like an updated version of the old Chase HQ arcade game and has become one of the most fun titles I’ve played this year on the PSP

There’s a fantastic CGI opening at the start of each level, leading you into theaction, all the baddies have very amusing Russian accents.

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It’s pretty easy and first, while being damned effective, but gets tougher later,although most sections will only take 2-3 goes at most to get to the next checkpointonce you figure out what you need to do. For those that do take several attempts,causing you to die, inbetween, you’ll quickly be able to restart at the lastcheckpoint.

At first you’ll only be able to do the missions it gives you, but after thatyou’ll be able to choose. Playing the missions themselves, you’ll take a lotof hits but blowing away the baddies helps you build up a Justice meter andthen transfer energy to boost your car’s “shield”. I kept forgetting to dothis so often died a lot 🙂

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This title has several hours of gameplay available, and while the walk-along-and-shootlevels are a bit hit-and-miss in terms of quality and are slightly crude, thedriving is fantastic, be it in a car or on speedboat (helicopter ones whereyou have to gun down the baddies are a bit annoying, though, as it’s sometimesdifficult to blast someone enough before it whisks you away because there’s amountain coming up that you’ve got to avoid) with James Bond-style chasemusic in the background.

Aside from shooting the enemy to death, you can get into an altercation with oneand end up having to press three or four buttons in order from circle/square/triangle/crossin order to succeed. This generally needs to be done twice. Fail, and it’sback to the checkpoint. This is rather an iffy system as it takes a while toget used to it and isn’t particularly sorted to a third-person shooter.

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Some observations about irritations within the game, though:

• 1. One thing weird is that there was a big rockface in a quarry, blockingmy way, that I could simply walk through. How odd.
• 2. Sometimes it’s difficult to work out where to shoot in cases where you’vegot to use your sniper rifle, and you’ll lose that time, but going through thelevel a couple of times more should sort that out.
• 3. The auto-targeting can be pain sometimes – you have two men shooting atyou while running around. One’s almost dead, but the other one comes in frontso the target switches to him, who you have to kill before bumping off thelast breath of the first… except you’ve got little strength left and youdie as a result. Grrrr!
• 4. When you’re chasing in a vehicle after someone, literally, one momentyou’ll be accused of falling behind and should catch up, the next you’re toldnot to get too close. That’s just frustrating as well as unnecessary.

All that said, overall, this game gives you one hell of an adrenaline rush andif you’re playing it in a break at work you’ll really not want to come back toreality….

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GRAPHICS
SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC
PLAYABILITY
ENJOYMENT


OVERALLReview copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2008.

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