Leap from motor to motor
One thing that we need to make clear is that Pursuit Force isn’t a racer… well, it is, but it’s a combat orientated racer… with boats too… and helicopters… and busses, lorries, jeeps and motorbikes… Oh and don’t forget the third person on-foot stuff as well. Ok, so filing Pursuit Force under a particular genre is going to be tricky as it blurs the boundaries between game types and, from what I’ve seen, it does it very well too.
Talking to Jonathan and Chris, it’s clear they’re both avid action movie fans and they’ve used a multitude of action movies as the inspiration for Pursuit Force. The basic idea is that you play the role of a new type of policeman, brought in to deal with the hardened criminals running wild over the city. As the game’s name suggests, the vast majority of your work is done on the roads, chasing down the bad guys and bringing them to justice.
The basic method of doing this is to race along in your souped up squad car, catch up to the fleeing bad dudes and then blast them with whatever weapons comes to hand. Now shooting at other cars from a car is nothing new, but Pursuit Force takes it to a whole new level. Instead of just having your character and the car as one thing that drives along, you’re actually independent of the car, meaning that if your current motor gets too badly shot up, or isn’t suitable for the terrain you’re driving over, you can just hop into another car.
Well, when I say ‘hop’ into another car, what I mean is that you leap from your car to the one you fancy driving and take that over. Now if there’s bad guys in it, you’ll have to deal with them first… so not only do we get some excellent car to car gun battles, you’ve now got the prospect of fighting ON the cars as they scream along and you try to take out the bad guys driving! This ‘car jumping’ ability lends a whole new aspect to the game as you can now start thinking about your car’s health status and switch if you need to, but on top of that, taking over a another car might give you a new weapon to use too. Got loads of bad guys to take down and only the pistol to do it with? Never mind, leap over to that jeep and grab the dude’s shotgun which’ll then nicely take down enemy cars from close range.
