Last year we liked but didn't love Pursuit Force, the PSP title that had gamers leaping from one car to the next, Road Warrior style, whilst chasing down some truly tenacious goons. At a recent preview event we had a chance to play Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice, which builds upon the same mechanics found in the original.
The Gamer's Day demo featured three playable missions, each of which showed off a little bit of the expanded Pursuit Force universe. That's a small number, but expect more than ten times that many in the final product: roughly fifty missions will be on the tarmac, with a story that intertwines throughout. That's a step away from the more arcade-like presentation of last year's game, at least from a narrative perspective.
Several new vehicles will be part of the newly deepened action, an airplane, hovercraft, tank and fire truck among them. A quartet of additional characters will also appear now and again to render assistance, such as the gunner who will dramatically boost your firepower at key moments.
During the demo mission "Yuri the Fury," an adventure focused primarily around tank destruction, we saw some of the new stuff in action. The level begins with a helicopter assault on a hijacked missile base; you'll have to man a gatling gun to take out missile launchers, jeeps and RPG-equipped foot soldiers.
Further on in the level, however, we saw the AI assist come into play. A female officer joined us in a police cruiser, which we had to navigate close enough to a rampaging tank for her to leap aboard and place explosives. That meant getting close, at which point she'd jump on; then we had to keep enemies at bay for a few seconds and close in on the tank again for her to leap back and grab another charge. After the tank's rear end was disabled, we had to leap aboard ourselves and go from hatch to hatch, tossing down grenades and firing at the tank's drivers.
Two other demo missions had us escorting the President in a motorcade and trying to chase down a gang leader with a captured physicist in tow. Both of these missions were much more like last year's action, though that ain't a bad thing; if anything, the ability to leap between cars was more responsive and the driving model definitely seemed better-tuned. Since the handling in the original game was a big reason to throw your PSP into a wall, that's a very good thing.
All that we need to see now (besides the promised four-player ad hoc mode) is a better checkpoint management system. Granted, if the auto handling is better, the lengthy distance between checkpoints might not be as much of an issue as before. But even with the recent price drop, PSPs are expensive, and we'd like to minimize the risk of destroying ours in a fit of Pursuit Force-induced irritation.
