Pursuit Force

• Platform: Sony PSP
• Published by: SCEA
• Developed by: Bigbig Studios
• Release Date: Mar 7, 2006
• Genre: Action
• Multiplayer: No
• Online: No

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Pursuit Force Preview

-- February 3, 2006 by: Chris Remo

The PSP has been a pretty racing-friendly system. It has games like Criteron's Burnout Legends, SCEE's Wipeout Pure, and Namco's Ridge Racer, all of which have been well received. Now, UK-based Bigbig Studios is bringing another car-centric game to the system, though it's not quite like the others. You still find yourself racing down what is basically a set "track," but your main concern is not so much reaching the end of the track first as it is shooting a bunch of outlaws in the face before they can reach the end of the track.

Pursuit Force actually came out last year in Europe, but it's not slated for release until March 7 in North America. One of the most common complaints leveraged against the game upon its home turf launch was that it is simply too difficult, brutally so at times. Bigbig is going back and fine-tuning the game's learning curve for its upcoming release to try and rectify those concerns.

The game casts the player as a member of the titular Pursuit Force, an elite organization whose goal is to put a stop to the rampant gang-related crime that is overtaking the fictionalized America in which the game is set. The backdrop has somewhat of a GTA feel, with its themed gangs and slightly exaggerated reality, but I drew more of a connection with the first two GTA titles rather than the grittier world of GTA3+. These gangs include such groups as the creatively named The Convicts, who are in fact all convicts; The Vixens, former stuntwomen; Killer 66, Yakuza-esque Asian motorcycle gangsters; The Warlords, Vietnam vets and mercenaries, and the Capelli family, your requisite Godfather-esque Mafia syndicate.

What gives the Pursuit Force its name is that it seems to conduct almost all of its crimefighting business by literally pursuing criminals in high speed car chases--or motorcycle chases, or speedboat chases. While there are some on-foot sections and a couple other gameplay conceits, the bulk of the game consists of these chases. You'll be barrelling down a linear, but nonlooping, track, usually attempting to take out gang members driving their own vehicles. This can be done by simply shooting them out the window (the game features an aim-locking mechanism), but that tends to be too time-consuming and difficult. What the game is really all about is leaping from your vehicle to your enemy's vehicle, shooting them all through the windshield or roof, and commandeering the ride yourself. What happens to the official law enforcement vehicle you've just discarded? This is not the sort of game in which that matters.

The game's jumping mechanic is the big hook to the gameplay, and it works very well. When you are within jumping range of another vehicle, usually after having pulled up parallel to it, you are presented with a jump icon and can make the death-defying leap over to the hood (or trunk, depending on your trajectory) to dispense what some Sony press release somewhere probably describes as "your own unique brand of justice." What's gratifying about the maneuvre is that it's not actually death-defying; you'll make it every single time, and that works in the game's favor. This basically describes the bulk of what you do in the game--chase criminals, jump on their cars, kill them, repeat--so it's nice that the difficulty is based on becoming more efficient at completing your mission objectives in time rather than having to worry about precise aiming on a portable system. You'll be using a variety of weapons, such as shotguns, pistols, submachine guns, and so forth, but for the most part they have the same basic overall effect on your enemies' health bars.

I played through three levels of the game, all of which followed essentially the same basic structure. "Cold Contract" had me piloting a speedboat through a canal in pursuit of Capelli hitmen, each of whom I had to eliminate before they reached the end of the level. Next, I played "Toxic Armory," in which several members of the Warlord gang were making off with what I believe were nuclear warheads. Rather than simply kill the perps, this mission required me to explicitly commandeer each of their vehicles. In practice, you're going to want to always be doing that anyway, so I didn't complain. "Wilde's Boys" was actually most memorable for the one-liners that were constantly being yelled out by my enemies, stuff like "Ghost that fool!," "Billy Wilde plays for keeps, dawg!" (and there were captions, so, yes, it was definitely spelled "dawg"), and my favorite, "This cop's on me like stink on pooh!" The voice acting is cheesy to the extreme, but I suspect it is intended to be. The actual gameplay of the level was identical to Cold Contract, but with more enemies and in cars rather than boats. This is the main downside I see with Pursuit Force. What it does, it does very well, but in the levels that I played, it doesn't really do anything else. It's easy to imagine this repeated goal starting to wear thin. That said, there are some on-foot sections and boss battles that I was not able to try out; hopefully they're well done enough to keep things spiced up.

The presentation of the game is very good. The visuals are clean and colorful, and are appropriately styled after Hollywood action movies and games like GTA, which present a world that, while ostensibly "realistic," is exaggerated in the right ways. The PSP's power is put to good use, with pleasing environments and nicely detailed character models. There's also a map with the location of each enemy vehicle, which helps a great deal.

What Pursuit Force realizes, that many of its full-scale PSP action game brethren do not, is that it is in fact a portable game. To the system's great detriment, many of its titles are simply rehashes of console titles, or simultaneously developed alongside console titles; on the other hand, much of the success of the DS has been due to not only the system being portable, but its games being portable. Pursuit Force, with its straightforward and instantly gratifying gameplay, manages to cut down on load times and should allow players to pick it up for a few minutes and still have a worthwhile experience, at least based on what I've seen so far. The game launches for PSP on March 7, 2006.