Pursuit Force

"Let's cuss"

A lot of gamers whine about wanting more challenge in their games, and here we have Big Big Studios attempting to give gamers a challenge--albeit a broken challenge that'll have you shipping your PSPs to Sony pretending the LCD blew up by itself.

You see this game has some fine assets marred by an unnecessary difficulty that borders on inane. To get the point of the game out of the way, you're on the pursuit force team, a team specialized in high speed missions. The winning gimmick here is the ability to jump from vehicle to another and plant bullets in onboard enemies' heads before manning the vehicle to yourself.

It's all lovely, if it weren't for that difficulty. From the opening mission you'll realize something is wrong--maybe it's the lack of any checkpoints, maybe it's the random actions from play to play, maybe it's the irrational fact that keeping the accelerator slammed while eating walls has your car speed faster than if you take the corners like a pro driver. On the later missions, you'll notice that the sectioned play (3 sections), all HARD, don't have any checkpoints in between. You fail, so you fail, and you will have little incentive to try again, which is IMO, a MAJOR FLAW.

You can also indulge in on-foot missions on the sides of vehicular high-speed chases/combat, but you won't be impressed. You can look at a wall, and the indifference between both activities won't strike you, since the gameplay is as bland as target, shoot, target, shoot, target, shoot, ensue boring bland cutscene with cheesy voice acting.

Speaking voice acting, I didn't really bother looking for an option to turn it off since I've been done with the game a couple o' hours in. Some characters will keep hammering you with voiced dialogue that's even more annoying than the irritating difficulty of the game.

You see, all the bad adds up; besides the pretty graphics and the lovely gameplay gimmick, there's nothing that makes you stay here. Gameplay drives you away, difficulty drives you away, and the plentiful great games out there should indeed drive you away. If you're really into challenges, give it a try, but if you agree with me on that it's more about random frustration than challenge (DMC3 is challenging for example), holla!

Pros

+Graphics/animation
+Jumping vehicles

Cons

-Annoying voice acting
-Boss battles are like little leeches that find a way to latch onto your brain and suck away at it
-Inane Difficulty--mistake rather on developer's part than player's
- Poor on-foot sections, as if slapped on in the last minute
-Boat sections will bore you to tears

Story - 5
Visuals - 8
Audio - 1

Gameplay - 4
-Fun Factor - 3
-Controls - B
-Difficulty - Inane
Lifespan - 3

Overall - 4

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 11/13/08

Game Release: Pursuit Force (US, 03/07/06)