Pursuit Force (PSP) – The Game Hoard

Police chases straight out of action movies seem like an exciting prospect for a game, and Pursuit Force initially seems to lean into the thrill of driving criminals off the road. It throws in a few boat chases, a few footfights, and even some time spent on a helicopter’s mounted gun, but games like 2012’s Spy Hunter reboot show that fast cars can sometimes be cheap thrills. But Pursuit Force has one idea up its sleeve that elevates it beyond a racing game that just looks exciting, and that’s the hijacking mechanic.

As you attempt to thwart the criminal gangs of Capital State in this PSP action game, you have two health bars that you must keep an eye on in order to survive. One is tied to the police officer you play, this special member of a newly formed Pursuit Force unit set up to curb the dominance of five gangs in the city, thankfully with regenerating health, but with a few conditions. While on foot he must remain silent in order to recover and while driving he must avoid collisions, the time it takes to recover is a bit long and the recovery rate is slow enough that you can’t just wait for the danger to pass, especially since many missions are races to stop criminals before they reach their destination. Where things get more exciting, however, is the fact that your vehicle has a health bar. By performing violent actions, such as ramming or shooting criminals, you can gain energy for a meter that you can use to heal yourself and your vehicle instantly, but most of the time during a mission you will have to leave the vehicle you start in and jump into new vehicles in order to stay in the game. Citizens may seem happy to leave the wheel to you, but when you get into a criminal’s car, you’ll have to endanger your cop’s life to quickly take him out and impound his vehicle.

Vehicle hopping is the most exciting part of a mission in Pursuit Force, as it’s not only a way to stay in the game, but also a strategic consideration. The only way to acquire new weapons beyond your police pistols is to jump on a gang member’s car and take them out, an interaction that’s quick but potentially dangerous based on what they’re carrying. Jump on a car full of thugs and your number is likely to be higher, especially if one of them is carrying a shotgun. You can open fire on their vehicle before you make the jump, but that means it’ll be weaker when it’s in your hands. The same energy bar that fills up to heal you or a vehicle can instead be used to perform a slow-motion jump between cars, allowing you to aim and fire at the drivers and any gunmen, making the hijacking easier to complete safely. Some missions require you to steal vehicles loaded with valuable goods, while others allow you to hijack a target more quickly than by firing at them with your weapons. But finding the right balance between when to jump and when to take out the enemy with firepower is what keeps the missions exciting, and it makes the driving so smooth and responsive that it poses little challenge on its own.

Jumping to another vehicle requires you to press the appropriate button when an icon appears on-screen, and sometimes getting that icon to appear can be trickier than you might think. Usually if you’re driving at the same speed near a desired target it will appear, but the leniency is wavering, especially since the game doesn’t seem to prioritize the option for civilian vehicles much, perhaps in an attempt to prevent the icon from appearing too often. It’s much easier to trigger a jump to another car or boat when there are gang members inside, but if your car is about to blow up and you’re desperate for a ride, it can feel like the game has trouble detecting a civilian vehicle even if you’re brushing against it. This will likely only be a major problem in the game’s boss battles, where gang leaders wield powerful weapons that can quickly wipe out a ride’s health, but these boss battles also contain an interesting risk-reward element. The energy meter you can use to heal is known as the Justice Meter, and when it’s full, you do more damage. With bosses, you’re almost betting that you’ll need to have your Justice Meter all the way up to empty their hefty health bar before they can escape. That doesn’t mean you want to spend your energy on healing or slow-motion hijacking, though. Plus, hitting a civilian vehicle will also empty the bar, so even if it’s easy to drive, there’s something to be aware of.

Boat driving is a little less responsive to match the vehicle type, but the hijacking retained in that form of play still feels important to spice up the action. It’s less common than the regular driving in the game’s 30-mission Career mode, but it’s an enjoyable diversion, as is the way the game divides its mission types into groups of five. There are five gangs that have turned Capital State into a crime-ridden hotspot where the police had little hope of protecting the populace before the Pursuit Force and their specialized vehicles and officers stepped in. Some of the gangs are expected or reasonable ideas for villains, with the Capelli crime family your typical mafiosos and the Convicts made up of escaped convicts seeking revenge. On the other hand, the Vixens are a group of gemstone thieves whose theme seems to be that they’re women, and the Killer66 feel less like a yakuza pastiche and more like a lot of ideas about Japanese culture rolled into one gang. The Warlords are perhaps the best example of why it matters which gang you face in a mission, as the Warlords have stolen military equipment and that means that any mission they’re involved in can involve heavy firearms. Each gang has their own weapons, and their focus can lead to more specific types of gameplay, such as how the Vixens often focus more on stealing their vehicles to get a job done, while the Killer66 have to endure much more gunfights on foot. Even within gang missions you can get things like protecting a hostage where you can’t do the car jump for a change, and things like an indestructible car chasing you introduce a bit of a shake-up, so your hijacking antics aren’t always the answer to overcoming tough opponents.

Gunfights on foot and manning the chain gun turret in the helicopter are admittedly the easiest game modes on offer and are less common than the others. They are often just part of a larger mission and a good place for the game to knock down a checkpoint, with the player not always having to restart a mission from the beginning if they fail, even if many of them are fairly quick. Manning the minigun is simply a case of aiming and firing, although there are at least incoming attacks to shoot down and the need to avoid innocents with your fire, but the missions with the gun on foot vary. Sometimes it can be very easy to just hold the lock-on button and fire continuously, this type of fire can also be found in a vehicle, but it makes more sense to have such aiming allowances when racing in fast vehicles where free aim can be difficult to line up. You can also approach criminals on foot and arrest them, then take their weapon. That is why hijackings work though. The player will have to put themselves in danger again and most of the gang members will come up to you and attack you if you try to wait for the gang to automatically heal.

The 30-mission career mode that divides the order in which you tackle gangs based on how level unlocks are spread out already feels like it executes the game’s concepts well, but there are two additional modes and one that focuses more on the driving while ramping up the difficulty to accommodate this. The races aren’t as simple as they sound, each one has a small story framework and forces you into a specific vehicle. You’re not trying to clear laps or even get to the starting line in race mode, the other drivers are already out and ahead of you and you have to catch up and pass them before you reach the end of the road. Some of these are simply tests of your driving skills against opponents who can take some of the game’s tightest turns without losing much speed, but others can introduce additional effects, such as one that’s framed as a race for an antidote where your driver will sometimes blur their vision to disrupt your driving. Time Trial mode ends up being the rare place where the game focuses purely on speed, with several sections of the game’s locations turned into races against the clock with only traffic and turns to worry about. Capital State has a decent range of locations, including a beachside city and the snowy heights, but the roads definitely feel more alive when you’re fighting deadly enemies rather than just trying to complete a course in a set amount of time.

THE VERDICT: Pursuit Force keeps the driving simple, allowing the actual battle with Capital State’s gangs to be the adrenaline-pumping, car-hopping centerpiece. Race and Time Trial modes are decent extras, but in Career Pursuit Force dishes out a variety of situations that call for risk-taking and interesting decisions, even healing is tied to a system where you may want to avoid energy so you can conserve the power boost it provides. The game’s dabble in on-foot and helicopter segments are simpler but not overly present, instead allowing for high-octane battles in boats and cars to keep the tension going, with a good range of objectives to keep the suspense alive.

And so I give Pursuit Force for PlayStation Portable…

A GOOD review. Pursuit Force’s box manages to showcase the car-jumping action that’s so important to keeping the action energetic, engaging and unique, with just the right allowances made to encourage the hijacking mechanics without breaking the game’s difficulty. You don’t have to worry too much about driving outside of a few select spots and things like Race Mode, so you can focus on knocking other cars off the road or taking them out by climbing aboard. However, stronger enemies will be able to blow you away if you get careless and just jump from car to car, and missions like the boss fights not only can’t be completed in time if you waste too much time switching cars, but the Justice Meter creates an interesting balance that you have to manage, as you need to stay alive but you also need the benefits it can provide to your fighting ability. While the on-foot shooting is more of a novelty than a key component of whether the game works or not, and the same could be said for the additional game modes, Pursuit Force seems to understand its greatest strength and the alternating between car and boat action feels more like a way to keep the action from devolving into one big sequence of vehicular combat.

Shooting down enemy helicopters from the road below, trying to survive in the missile-laden boat of the self-proclaimed Warlords general, shaking off gang members who jump on your car, walking across the roof of a truck to take it over… Much of the action in Pursuit Force certainly sounds exciting, but having the effective and exciting mechanic of hijacking enemy vehicles during a chase so well integrated takes the experience from superficial bombast to genuinely engaging gameplay, making you not only want to see what the action looks like next, but to be the one to pull it off yourself.

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