Jump My Ride...
Now that’s just taken me two pages to give you a rough idea of who the game plays so you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s a bit of nightmare to play but the controls are actually very simple. The superb thing about Pursuit Force is that Bigbig have spent a good deal of time making sure the game mechanics take care of all the fiddly stuff whilst letting you get on with the tricky part of playing. You don’t have to worry about aiming a cursor as you can just scroll through the target lock function to pick who to shoot… You don’t need to worry about being close enough to jump to another car there’ll be a big icon on the screen of you can… in fact all you have to worry about is completing the missions and it’s at this point that you might just encounter your one of the game’s niggles… Some of the missions are so hair-pullingly frustratingly hard you could find yourself hurling your PSP out of the window.
The mission structure is arranged so that you don’t have to pay all the way through each of the five different crime gangs in the game and at most times you have a choice of who to go after, which invariable means different mission types. The problem is that some of the missions are on a tighter timescale than a military operation and you could find yourself doing the same missions over and over again as you desperately try to succeed in at least one area.
The separate health for cars and your character is a great idea as it brings into play a whole new tactic of whether to stick with the faster car that’s already taken a pummelling or go for the tougher but slower jeep or even make a quick bail to a slow and weak civilian car just to avoid dying. The same goes for the weapon collection system as this positively encourages vehicle leaping antics or you’ll be stuck later on with a weak pea-shooter staring down the barrel of some stupidly big hand cannons.
The third person sections are on the whole well accomplished and fit in nicely with the rest of the game. Whilst lacking the polish of the GTA series and taking place over much smaller areas, these third person sections are again a nice variation on the driving part of the game and work very well. This is due in no small part to the storyline running through the game, fed to you by comments from your deliberately stereotyped police chief.
In fact, now I mention it, all the dialogue is a cheesier than a wheel of brie in a warm room and its obviously deliberately so… Think along the lines of Captain Doby from Starsky and Hutch and you’ve got the right idea… Now take a every bad guy gang type stereotype you can think of and they’re all in here too. There’s the Mafioso Capellis with their huge American cars and Brooklyn-Italian accents; the sexy all-girl Vixens with their superfast high-performance cars; the Convicts who are a Mad Max style bunch of escaped, er… convicts; the Warlords are a load of mercenaries working on the wrong side of the law; and finally Killer 66, a blend of Triad style Far Eastern dudes with a penchant for drug trafficking.
Each of these different gang types has a different style of vehicle that they prefer to use, from the Killer 66’s souped to the max Japanese style GT cars to the Convicts scavenged hotrods built in their former prison workshops. And each has a different reason for being out on the streets and up to no good which you have to put a stop to.
