2006's Pursuit Force was a pleasant time-waster that married the high-octane shoot 'em up gameplay of early '90s arcade hits with insane car jumps and car-jacks usually found in the climaxes of action films. It didn't reinvent the wheel, but was fun enough to be a hit with PSP owners. UK-based bigBig Games has commissioned a sequel, Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice, to continue the car-hopping action of the first game. It's got a few new vehicle additions to spice up the action, but for better or worse, it's really an expansion on its predecessor.

In the last game, the Pursuit Force consisted of you, a single cop, and your hard-ass boss. This time around, as the commander of the Pursuit Force, a special police unit in Capital City, you'll have a squad at your disposal. There's a plot here, but it's tertiary to the action. What you need to know is that you'll be facing off against a variety of cartoonishly stereotyped gangs, including rednecks, British gangsters (the word "limey" is tossed around liberally), and a crooked special forces squad. Members of your squad have different attributes that they bring to the table to help you jack vehicles for justice. One's a good driver, one has extensive heavy gunning experience, another is good at demolitions.

Extreme Justice's appeal lies in its unapologetic and unironic cheesiness. The Pursuit Force are a group of rough-and-tumble cops who look like they're from comic books and who spout off dialogue ripped from any late-'80s after-school cartoon. Each member of the squad has his or her own pithy quips that function as window-dressing for the next mission. Once again, the criminals that you'll face are one-dimensional carjack fodder that seem to be molded from nutty stereotypes that only a non-American development team would devise. It totally works for the game, though. Like the cops 'n robbers arcade games that inspired it, EJ makes no pretenses about its shallow narrative.


Extreme Justice delivers more of the same in bigger, broader swaths. The core gameplay, which consists of driving up to criminal vehicles and either shooting them into a fiery husk or leaping from your own vehicle into theirs, still drives the experience. It's good fun and lends itself well to a handheld experience, since most of the missions are quite brief and arcade-y in nature. bigBig has added more content to the basic "jump, shoot, jack, rinse, lather, repeat" experience with the addition of first-person turret sections and some third-person action. For turret missions, you'll simply shoot with the R trigger and aim with the L trigger. It's a monotony-breaker but is hardly a ground-breaker. The third-person missions are clunkier than the core experience; the on-foot combat doesn't measure up to Syphon Filter, as you'll encounter an awkward camera and clumsy targeting.

Thankfully, the frustrating difficulty of the first game has been addressed. It's a bit easier to hop in and enjoy yourself. The concept of squadmates seems like window-dressing since you have no control over who goes out into the streets with you. Visually, EJ is as sharp as the first game. It runs smoothly and does a great job capturing the sense of speed needed to give these sorts of chases and stunts an aesthetic credibility, in spite of generic locales.