| Pursuit Force review |
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Pursuit Force should be fun. Its cover practically bellows “THIS IS FUN!” in your face and stamps a guarantee of such in blood on your back. And for a few minutes it is, until the Dark Lord Shaitan rises from his sulphuric throne below and beats your soul about its ethereal head remorselessly with his enormously repetitive spiky sceptre of No-Funness.
“Get ready to discipline the Vixens,” squeaks the press release like the last ten years have never happened. “A foxy group of ex-Hollywood stunt girls who have chosen the life of crime to pay for their daring showgirl lifestyle and outfits, these girls have been trained in martial arts by the military.”
Shall we continue?
“Take justice into your own hands and, with the Vixens, led by Whiplash and Fox, you’re guaranteed to have your hands full.” Oooh, fnarr fnaar, reverend. With your Fox Force Five bawdiness you’re spoiling us. Why are we pursuing “girls” exactly? Was there an equivalent team of underage Hollywood stunt “boys” to complement them, dressed in dodgy Tom of Finland leather gear?
Enough of such tarrying; let us have our wicked, wicked way with the fun stuff first. Pursuit Force sticks you in the shoes of a speed-lovin’ rozzer who, after driving very, very fast in his car, enjoys murdering, oh I dunno, 20-30 perps or so a day by hopping from vehicle to vehicle, pausing momentarily to rest pensively upon a suspect’s bonnet whilst pumping 1000 rounds into their face through the windscreen (skills that the police force treasure highly in this day and age). Bashing and shooting criminals gradually fills your Justice bar, which can then either be used to facilitate bullet time whilst jumping or instantly replenish your/your vehicle’s health. Occasionally the game proffers speedboat, helicopter and on-foot sections too, the latter of which is so horribly broken it makes us wish the devco (UK newcomers bigBIG, a newly devolved studio born of WRC-developing parent Evolution) had paid more attention to the Chief’s advice in Apocalypse Now: “Never get out of the boat [car, Bananamobile, whatever]”.
They’re a chore and simply running in the right direction is a pain – factor in shooting at (plentifully autolocked) crims whilst the camera lurches around like a drunken tramp and, well, you get the idea. This, however, would be a mitigated chore if the rest of the game were so good it took the pain away like a blissful analgesic. And the damning, damning perversity that plagues this title is it so very nearly is, but then the rebuff inevitably arrives like an unloved season in the most vicious way possible: to survive it requires the most ardent demonstration of willpower in not whipping the UMD from the PSP’s still-whirring slot and stomping it underfoot in order to feel some sense of closure.
Pursuit Force has been playtested by masochists – there’s simply no other explanation. The mission structure is such that the game provides you with multiple themed paths in Career mode (one pursuing the cartoon mafioso Capelli family, another pursuing escaped convicts, as well as the aforementioned Vixens (dey so shexxxy)) and each mission is usually broken up into several stages: trailing the suspects without alerting them; pursuing and defeating them; besting a boss. Most of these are spitefully difficult right from the outset (including featuring incredibly laborious vehicle handling – the game offers no advanced techniques for accelerating/turbo/powersliding, so merely catching up with the felons is sometimes exceedingly difficult, let alone negotiating hairpin turns with your brick of a car) and simply completing them is onerous enough without having to do well enough to achieve an A or B rank (the C rank will be ubiquitous). The game does not feature mid-stage restarts/checkpoints: this simple fact will haunt man’s higher brain functions for many an evening, prompting the single question “Why?” as he lifts his head to the heavens to curse the Creator. Based on various bigBIG mutterings, it's to promote game longevity since the missions last only "a few minutes" each: these minutes may come to seem like hours.
Let’s take an early mission (Deadeye) as an example – the game requires the player to tail the villains, protect the mayor, race to the docks in order to procure a speedboat to pursue said monocular prat, and then take him out whilst being targeted constantly by him. Fair enough. On the eighth straight attempt this starts to seem less than appealing. When the player has knocked himself out whittling the dastardly sniping git’s health down bit by bit and he nails you with barely a scintilla left, having to go riiiiight baaaack to the beginning and redo the whole tedious “race to the docks” and “fight your way through a motley procession of bad guys” to get back into the real action seven or eight times in a row requires the patience of St. Francis of Assisi, and even the beatific man himself may have been forced to utter a few ungodly expletives (in, perhaps, a Mario-like voice).
All of this is fairly tragic, for beneath Pursuit Force’s savagely unfriendly and derivative pelt lies the telltale heart of a good game. It looks great (slightly chuggy framerate aside), the presentation’s all there (encompassed by an old-school fascia so cheesy it’s beyond ironic, tied up with a pretty Richard Jacques sonic bow): you want it to be good, it seems like it should be fun, but time and again utterly basic flaws in design refute any sort of player goodwill and provoke savage head-scratching (nay, eye-pokery) at how this could possibly have got through QA without someone, for God’s sakes, ticking the box marked “It’s ******* exasperating, no-one will want to play on.”
We could meander and inform of the various obligatory Time Trial and Race modes that support the main Career mode, but to do so would be a disservice to the point, thus being: you should buy this game only if you like stabbing your hands with bits of glass like Batman does in Arkham Asylum. Either that, or you’re fairly confident the PSP’s build quality will ensure it surviving forehead-screen interface. bigBIG have promised to address the difficulty spike and learning curve (or lack of) for the US release of this title; let's hope they ponder the meaning of "fun" in the meantime...
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System: Sony PlayStation Portable
Genre: Arcade
Developer: bigBIG
Publisher: SCEE
Players: 1
Version: European
Reviewed: Dec 2005
Writer: Bill Fuller
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Pros:
- It’s pretty
- It has a pleasant Lucky and Wild old-skool flavour
- It tries to be fun, bless its heart…
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Cons:
- …shame Hitler playtested it
- Incessantly difficult with no real learning curve
- No checkpoints limits the fun
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Pursuit Force Video: 4.0MB
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