Remember those old, arcade cop shooters? Well, imagine you've got one of those on a small portable device, that you can take anywhere with you and play. Pursuit Force is precisely that. It can be a lot of fun, but just like older games, it can also be very frustrating with its challenging difficulty. It's quite cool how the game puts you in the shoes of this one cop who is the whole pursuit force, jumping from car to car - shooting gangsters in mid-air. Top it off with some awesome character animations and you've got one stylish game. However, all is not as it seems.
Pursuit Force is centred around two main types of gameplay: driving on the road, and using a boat to swim through other levels. Basically, your main goal is to jump from car to car (or boat to boat, bus to bus, truck to truck; depending on the situation) and kill the driver and passengers. Of course, if you ram cars of innocent civilians instead of raging criminals, then you get points taken off your score at the end of the mission. The objectives of each mission may differ from tailing someone, to destroying vehicles or protecting another vehicle/ its cargo. However, the gameplay always remains very similar and does little in order to keep the experience fresh. Sadly there is no story to keep you immersed. While the gangs do have backgrounds, they're quite limited and undeveloped - same goes for the characters.
The gameplay itself is actually very fun, and it would've been great if it was just a little more varied and the difficulty less harsh on newcomers who may be put off because of how hard and frustrating some missions can get. Although none of the game is unbeatable (even if it may seem so for a while), Pursuit Force does begin to enter the territory of cheap difficulty where you're no longer challenged to create new strategies. You just have to rely on repeatedly retrying the mission you're stuck on in hope of getting lucky and completing the difficult part.
Visually, for a handheld originally released in 2005, Pursuit Force is an impressive piece of software. The environments look good, some cars are pretty cool and the best of it all, the protagonist's animations. Jumping from your car and onto the roof or front of another whilst shooting and getting shot at has never before looked so badass. You do get some variation in weaponry for each pursuit, as you can pick up your enemy's guns after defeating them. There's your starting weapon with unlimited ammo, the pistol. Then you also get some others like a submachine-gun, shotgun and so on. All of them sound decent. The soundtrack itself consists of some cool music, but none of the stuff you'll hear is very memorable and doesn't do much to immerse the player.
While the game does focus mainly on shooting criminals in speeding land and water vehicles, there are some exceptions. In some missions, you may get to do some on-foot combat or operate the chain gun of a flying chopper to shoot at the outlaws on the road. These different gameplay sections do provide some variety, but we don't get to play them that often and when we do, we realize that the developers could've made them much more exciting and spiced them up with some extra content. Fortunately, there's quite a lot of extra content outside of the campaign (such as races, time trials and others) but the only way to unlock all of it is by finishing campaign missions with higher scores than your previous ones. This of course brings only more frustration.
Now it's time to go over the best and worst points of Pursuit Force.
The Good:
+ Awesome character animations
+ Addictive and fun gameplay formula
+ Good controls, driving feels great
+ Impressive visuals, but no artistic flair
The Bad:
- Impressive visuals, but no artistic flair
- Not enough variety in campaign missions
- Often there is an overly challenging level of difficulty
- No story, no characters, no good plot
If you like to do some old-school, arcade-style gaming or are looking for a fun, but very challenging driving and shooting game for your PSP, then Pursuit Force should satisfy you and give you your money's worth with a campaign of good length and some additional, unlockable gameplay modes. If you want to complete everything this game has on offer, I'd say you're looking for around 20 to 30 hours of gameplay max, depending on just how good you are or how easily you can be frustrated. However, if you're not a fan of this genre or just don't think you'd like this game from what you've seen then it's probably best to stay away from it. Don't get me wrong, Pursuit Force is a fair driving game for the PlayStation Portable… but it feels a bit dated and its difficulty not only makes it too challenging, but also too frustrating half of the time you play it.
OVERALL RATING – 6.5/10 (Passable)
NEW GS RATING – 6/10