Game:

Pursuit Force (2005)

Duration: 14:51

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Pursuit Force is a fun, early action game for the PSP produced and developed by the British Video Game Team, Big Big (or Bigbig) Studios Limited. Interestingly, BBSL was founded by a core team of four former Codemasters employees. For BBSL's first game, it successfully combines several genres (Shooting, Racing, etc.) and concepts (Gang violence, Warfare, B-Movie Humor and Stunts, etc.) to create a game with over-the-top action, several tough and short missions, and an overall good portable playing experience with a somewhat arcadey feel. The game revolves around a new, extreme type of fictional police force known as "Pursuit Force" of Capital City who is out to stop five of the worlds most dangerous crime factions: The Warlords, Capelli Family (Mafia), Killer 66, Convicts, and The Vixens.

You simply do whatever missions you can to rise in rank, which will allow you to take on more advanced missions. The missions are relatively simple in their design, which can range from escorting characters, defeating all enemies (within a time limit or city range), recovering stolen items or dangerous machinery/tools, or even stopping various enemy threats on foot in third-person shootouts. This allows for fairly varied gameplay and objectives early on as there are various vehicles (such as cars, trucks, buses, boats, helicopters, etc.) and objectives to play with, but becomes repetitive after a little while, though this isn't a fault of the game on the developers behalf, as the game is chock full of unlockable cheats, movies, and other content and modes.

The thing that really adds to the fun is the ability to fight enemies by jumping from vehicle to vehicle while driving over 150mph, dodging attackers, racking up multiple fatalities, and gaining enough momentum and style points to enter "Full Justice Mode", where you can assault enemies in slow-mo while jumping from vehicle to vehicle (to reduce the threat of being attacked once situated) or use this limited ability to restore your health or repair your vehicle. If you envision "Chase: Hollywood Stunt Driver" with "Max Payne", you have a fair idea of what this game is already like.

The graphics are relatively good for a PSP game, with a variety of high-quality movies for the various factions and important events to set the mood. Stages are crisp and relatively detailed, and the special effects are also quite nice. The soundtrack is pretty good, with some tunes sounding surprisingly epic in their composition, though there isn't much variety in the tracks. The voices and dialogue are just what you'd expect from a game with a B-Movie approach-- they're decent if not a little cheesy with silly one-liners and empty enemy threats. The gameplay has a few, mostly minor flaws. The game features pretty good controls once you learn how the different modes of transport work, but jumping from each vehicle isn't always precise, which can cause some frustration when aiming for some of those "A" ranks, though it isn't enough to be a big deterrent. The game could've afforded to have some adjustable difficulty settings for novice gamers however, as the game by default is a little more on the challenging side after the first few missions. Another thing to mention is that the load times are pretty high initially, though you don't have to spend a whole lot of time reloading to restart missions and the like. Still, this is a good game overall that is well worth the price of admission in this day and age. A sequel was also released known as "Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice".

This is a video showing some of the game in action. Enjoy.