Back to Capital City
Pursuit Force's sequel is coming soon. We go hands-on with two levels and multiplayer.
Published: December 16, 2007
It's been just over a year and a half since the free-flying hero of the first Pursuit Force game collared a handful of gangs threatening to take over Captial City. His efforts all but single-handedly saved the city (with some help from fellow squad mates from the then-recently formed Pursuit Force squad), and for two years, Capital City has been enjoying a spate of relative peace. During this tenuous lull in rampant crime, the Pursuit Force has become internationally known, with special forces and crack police forces from all over the globe wanting to get in the action.
It's also meant our hero has had time to settle down a little. He's been promoted to the head of the department and managed to get hitched to Sarah, a blonde bombshell that just so happens to know her way around a helicopter rather nicely. As they're about to tie the knot, The Convicts, freshly escaped from imprisonment, decide to crash the wedding -- literally. A peck and wave later, and the Pursuit Force are on the case.
Such is the intro rolled out before the first proper level (or case, as they're called in the game) kicks off. Just seconds into the race to take down the wedding crashers, though, and it felt like being back home. The object (at least in the first case) is still to jump from car to car at will, eventually landing on the bad guys' ride, pumping their driver's seat full of bullets and then racing off to stop the next guy before they get to the end of the level.
The second case was also plenty familiar; we had to chase down a rogue general in a heavily armored tank, taking out a string of bad guys in the process, not to mention dodging incoming rocket fire from ground forces. After laying into baddies with an endless supply of chain gun ammo before the general arrived at a friendly base, we managed to blow off chunks of plating to get at the fleshy inhabitant inside. Both cases felt familiar, but bigBIG Studios has been working hard at making the levels pop quite a bit more, with increased traffic, windier levels and more sideline details.
We also got a brief peek at the game's multiplayer levels (it supports up to 16 players in Ad-Hoc Mode, though good luck finding that many people to gather in the same room). We were only able to play around with the vehicle-based modes, which included trying to notch as many kills on the other guys as possible (think Deathmatch with cars), while the other was a cops vs. robbers ramming race to take down the bad guys before the end of the level, though the robbers could refill their health by shooting a cop if they were close enough. The full game will ship with on-foot multiplayer matches too, which leads us to hope the controls there have been spruced up a little as they were the weakest of the bunch.
We'll have more on Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice (including how the PS2 port) is coming along soon.
It's also meant our hero has had time to settle down a little. He's been promoted to the head of the department and managed to get hitched to Sarah, a blonde bombshell that just so happens to know her way around a helicopter rather nicely. As they're about to tie the knot, The Convicts, freshly escaped from imprisonment, decide to crash the wedding -- literally. A peck and wave later, and the Pursuit Force are on the case.
Such is the intro rolled out before the first proper level (or case, as they're called in the game) kicks off. Just seconds into the race to take down the wedding crashers, though, and it felt like being back home. The object (at least in the first case) is still to jump from car to car at will, eventually landing on the bad guys' ride, pumping their driver's seat full of bullets and then racing off to stop the next guy before they get to the end of the level.
The second case was also plenty familiar; we had to chase down a rogue general in a heavily armored tank, taking out a string of bad guys in the process, not to mention dodging incoming rocket fire from ground forces. After laying into baddies with an endless supply of chain gun ammo before the general arrived at a friendly base, we managed to blow off chunks of plating to get at the fleshy inhabitant inside. Both cases felt familiar, but bigBIG Studios has been working hard at making the levels pop quite a bit more, with increased traffic, windier levels and more sideline details.
We also got a brief peek at the game's multiplayer levels (it supports up to 16 players in Ad-Hoc Mode, though good luck finding that many people to gather in the same room). We were only able to play around with the vehicle-based modes, which included trying to notch as many kills on the other guys as possible (think Deathmatch with cars), while the other was a cops vs. robbers ramming race to take down the bad guys before the end of the level, though the robbers could refill their health by shooting a cop if they were close enough. The full game will ship with on-foot multiplayer matches too, which leads us to hope the controls there have been spruced up a little as they were the weakest of the bunch.
We'll have more on Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice (including how the PS2 port) is coming along soon.
