Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice First Look

Last year saw the release of Pursuit Force, a delightfully shallow and fast-paced action game for the PSP that let you pull off absurd action-movie maneuvers like jumping from one speeding car to another, kicking the driver out the window, then using that car to take down a bunch of crooks. Sony is now working on a new sequel to the game called Extreme Justice that looks to be taking all the high points of the original and adding a few new gameplay features to the mix, just because, well, you can't have a sequel without some new features.

Sony says the original game received criticism for being a little too repetitive and not providing enough impetus to keep plowing through the missions. (We feel like leaping from speeding cars is a concept that sells itself, but anyway.) To keep the sequel feeling fresh throughout, developer Big Big Games is said to be giving Extreme Justice a "deeper story" that will arc across all of the game's roughly 50 interconnected missions. Naturally, the game will include new weapons and cars. Among the latter category, you can expect to jack a fire truck, a hovercraft, a tank, and an airplane before you've completed your mission of protecting Capital City from the five gangs that just won't stop terrorizing its fearful citizens.

The other big addition to Pursuit Force here is an additional four playable characters on top of your main protagonist. You won't select from these characters before a level; rather, they'll show up and help you at scripted times during certain missions. When they do show up, you'll receive some kind of gameplay bonus respective to their professions. For instance, the gunner will give you considerably more firepower, including a turret that you can control manually, while the helicopter pilot will naturally let you fly around in a helicopter. (What, you were expecting something else?)

We briefly got our hands on a demo of Extreme Justice and tried a mission in which we had to escort the president in one of the game's tricked-out, futuristic police cars through the mean city streets. This definitely looks and feels very familiar to last year's game, so it seems like the main improvements to this sequel are on the new-features side. Big Big is said to be balancing the difficulty a little more leniently this time, as the first game was apparently thought to be too hard by quite a few players.

Sony is promising a four-player ad hoc multiplayer mode in Extreme Justice, which is a first for the series--but reps declined to elaborate on the multiplayer or provide any other hard details on the game. Those details, in addition to media on the game, will be provided at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in July.