Xtreeeeeem!
Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice is everything a cheesy 80s action flick was, and by that we mean it's awesome.
Published: February 3, 2008
Though the main Story Mode is blessedly free from much of the aggravation in the original game, it's not all a cake walk. Plugging through Challenge Mode, which assigns you basic goals like defeating enemies solely by ramming into them, and tackling the Bounty Mode, which assigns points goals to the Story Mode missions, ramp up the difficulty a little more, and in the case of the latter, nets you stars which are used as currency to unlock everything from concept art to cheats that can make the game easier or harder.
The Ad-Hoc-only multiplayer modes are basically transplants of the main stuff found offline, and some, like the on-foot deathmatch stuff, aren't really worth investigating. The racing modes (including a co-op one where one person drives and another shoots) are a little better, but here too they feel tacked on. I'm not saying having some multiplayer is a bad thing, just that the modes aren't terribly exciting compared to the single-player stuff.
Part of that might be because of the crazy stuff you do when flying solo (and no, supposedly having other squad members specialized skills around you doesn't count, since they're basically useless), and part of the appeal of the solo craziness is largely because it all looks so damn good. Extreme Justice not only runs wonderfully on the PSP, but it all looks fantastic; solid textures with plenty more variety line the side of the roads, vehicles lose entire chunks of their body before exploding in a fireball, and the way the game streams data off the UMD means there's plenty of opportunity to mix up environments throughout a given mission.
Most of the action in the game is played out through in-engine cutscenes, with only the occasional pre-rendered segment thrown in during particularly important storyline bits. The pre-rendered stuff is of course quite nice, with motion capture on the characters and a particularly cartoony sense of direction, but that's not to say the game engine itself can't deliver some nice little ooh and ahh moments. There's nothing quite like screaming through a track for about five minutes only to actually arrive at the dam or treatment plant or what have you that you're supposed to be driving to.
If the game's audio were only concerned with gunshots, sirens, explosions and the occasional grunt from enemies, it would be fine. As it stands the bombastic soundtrack from Richard Jacques Studios does a fantastic job of building on the intensity of the last game's tunes with an appropriately high-energy set of themes that feel ripped right from Mark Mancina's work on something like the Bad Boys movies. Unfortunately, BigBig Studios wanted to give all the already stereotypical characters in the game a voice to go along with all the bad dialogue and the result is a handful of bad accents and worse deliveries of nearly all the lines in the game. Sure, it's cheesy just like the 80s movies that inspired them were, but 80s movies weren't watched for their witty repartee.
Also, a quick note to either BigBig, SCEA, or both: if you're going to make a game with a bunch of supposed Americans talking, you might not want to have them using the Queen's English. Hearing some supposed super-patriot calling a gang a pack of Limeys as an insult and in the same breath using "are" instead of "is" to describe said group doesn't really make for a convincing portrayal of American speech. Yeah, I know, it's a minor thing, but it's also one of those little things that tends to pop out when you've been referring to a properly titled group or department or what have you as a collective entity rather than a group of individuals.
Honestly, though, that was probably the most annoying part of Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice. The rest of it sailed right on by without major incident, culminating in a fantastic boss battle that just seemed to combine the best parts of all the major fights leading up to that point. Like its predecessor, Extreme Justice doesn't try to do too much, and with the exception of the on-foot segments, everything that it does it does quite well indeed. If you're capable of not questioning how a guy can grab onto the tail pipe of a plane without falling off or jump from one car doing 100+ miles an hour to another, then you're more than ready to have a blast with Pursuit Force.