Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice - hands-on

Dec 13, 2007

The first Pursuit Force, released last year on the PSP, skimmed under a lot of gamers' radars, but it had something no other game has had before or since - a balls-out-insane daredevil cop who stops criminals by leaping onto their cars during impossibly fast chases and stealing their rides out from under them. The sequel, Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice, is due out next month, and from what we've played so far, it looks to be more of the same - and we mean that in a good way.

Judging by the two levels in the demo version we played, the gameplay doesn't seem to have changed a great deal since the first Pursuit Force. You'll still spend most of your time tearing ass down a twisting-but-linear highway in a sporty police cruiser, chasing down carloads of exotic criminals in thugged-out jalopies. Once you've caught up, you can either ram or shoot them to death, or latch onto their vehicles with a daring high-speed leap before pumping the occupants full of lead and stealing their ride. The craziness is once again punctuated by slightly slower-paced on-foot shooting missions and on-rails segments where you'll hammer enemies with a helicopter-mounted chaingun, but most of the action still unfolds on the open road.

After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.