Distributed by
Sony

Price: £24.99 Players: 1 Widescreen: Yes Following up the original game, Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice is wonderful. In fact, it's like an updated version of the old Chase HQ arcade game and has become one of the most fun titles I've played this year on the PSP There's a fantastic CGI opening at the start of each level, leading you into the action, all the baddies have very amusing Russian accents.

It's pretty easy and first, while being damned effective, but gets tougher later, although most sections will only take 2-3 goes at most to get to the next checkpoint once you figure out what you need to do. For those that do take several attempts, causing you to die, inbetween, you'll quickly be able to restart at the last checkpoint. At first you'll only be able to do the missions it gives you, but after that you'll be able to choose. Playing the missions themselves, you'll take a lot of hits but blowing away the baddies helps you build up a Justice meter and then transfer energy to boost your car's "shield". I kept forgetting to do this so often died a lot :)

This title has several hours of gameplay available, and while the walk-along-and-shoot levels are a bit hit-and-miss in terms of quality and are slightly crude, the driving is fantastic, be it in a car or on speedboat (helicopter ones where you have to gun down the baddies are a bit annoying, though, as it's sometimes difficult to blast someone enough before it whisks you away because there's a mountain coming up that you've got to avoid) with James Bond-style chase music in the background. Aside from shooting the enemy to death, you can get into an altercation with one and end up having to press three or four buttons in order from circle/square/triangle/cross in order to succeed. This generally needs to be done twice. Fail, and it's back to the checkpoint. This is rather an iffy system as it takes a while to get used to it and isn't particularly sorted to a third-person shooter.

Some observations about irritations within the game, though: 1. One thing weird is that there was a big rockface in a quarry, blocking my way, that I could simply walk through. How odd. 2. Sometimes it's difficult to work out where to shoot in cases where you've got to use your sniper rifle, and you'll lose that time, but going through the level a couple of times more should sort that out. 3. The auto-targeting can be pain sometimes - you have two men shooting at you while running around. One's almost dead, but the other one comes in front so the target switches to him, who you have to kill before bumping off the last breath of the first... except you've got little strength left and you die as a result. Grrrr! 4. When you're chasing in a vehicle after someone, literally, one moment you'll be accused of falling behind and should catch up, the next you're told not to get too close. That's just frustrating as well as unnecessary. All that said, overall, this game gives you one hell of an adrenaline rush and if you're playing it in a break at work you'll really not want to come back to reality....

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2008.