Pursuit Force fuels up on adrenaline bringing another car jumping exclusive action experience to the Playstation Portable. Over land, air and sea, Extreme Justice is more over-the-top then the original delivering justice, one dent roof at a time.

If you have played the original Pursuit Force game from Sony then you will know exactly what you’re in store for in their second edition of the game, Extreme Justice. The formula for success hasn’t been changed only expanded. In Extreme Justice you will get to control four new playable characters, take down new gangs and traverse air, land, and sea in a number of vehicles. Faster and more challenging Extreme Justice brings the game to the player requiring you to think and move quick. More than shooting and ramming cars togther, Extreme Justice is a game of reflex mixed with over-the-top action.

Extreme Justice takes place in Capital City. Capital City is one crazy place where organized crime isn’t afraid of the law, as the criminals run wild in the streets. The story starts off showing Pursuit Force's humorous attitude with the cops wedding getting crashed by the metal faced Billy Wilde from the Convicts, a gang featured in the first Pursuit Force. Then it straight into hot pursuit with a new gang of squad members that want to enforce the law. Each rookie character has a special trait starting with the clichéd Police chief who commands the Pursuit Force team. The rest of the cast that sounds like they have been written out of a Quentin Tarantino film, the Cop, the driver, the pilot, the jumper, and the gunner.

For those who haven’t played Pursuit Force in the past, it’s basically a Hollywood action inspired vehicle based game where you complete multiple objectives to take down the enemies. This usually involves high speed car chases, doge and shoot gunfights, and death defying leaps. The gameplay is pure speed, acceleration action all the way. Extreme Justice has a total of five campaign acts that aimed at taking out each gang. The gangs you’ll be gunning for in Capital City consist of The Raiders, The Syndicate, and the returning gangs of The Convicts and The Warlords. Each gang has their own weapons and objectives basically create as much mayhem as possible, however it really doesn’t matter which gang you are chasing because it all feels the same. The objective with each gang is to obviously destroy them by taking out their leader. That means boss battles, fast pursuits, and many replayed sequences.

BigBig varies the missions enough to keep things interesting, although the core of the action is very repetitive. In vehicles you will be ramming opposing cars, firing at them with one arm out the window and leaping onto their rides gunning out the driver and taking his spot. This repeats numerous times during each mission keeping the action fast paced. The most exciting part of this is jumping onto other vehicles and blasting away. This is done by getting close enough to another vehicle and hitting the button as soon as you see the jump icon. This causes your character to leap on the other vehicle pull out your gun and start blasting away at the enemies in the vehicle. If your ‘Justice Meter’ is full then you can even shoot while performing mid-air leaps. This formula works on every car in Pursuit Force even if they are not a villain. If your ride is almost about to be destroyed you can safely jump into any ride and keep the justice flowing.

Besides chasing down enemies in vehicles, or escorting a special ride there are other missions that are added into the mix. These missions are usually broken down into a small section of a level and consist of events like taking the chamber of a mini-gun in the Pursuit Force Helicopter, or jumping behind a turret on a moving vehicle. Giving gamers more selection, Pursuit Force will even kick the gameplay into a third person perspective action game where you battle crime on your feet and not under the chasse of a vehicle. The focus of the game still rides with vehicle, however there is some run and gun work where you can infiltrate enemy bases and take down the criminals personally.

The Justice Meter that I mentioned has other functions besides slow motion shooting, you can also use the juice in the meter to restore your health and fix your vehicle. If you wait until the meter is full this is when the jumping and shooting is activated along with doing more damage when you fire. It’s a little tricky when the action is buzzing, but you should always try to keep one eye focused on the meter because it has saved my life more than once.

So far everything seems the same, but there have been some changes to Extreme Justice. First, Extreme Justice has done away with mission rankings and has added a coin system that is rewarded to gamers at the end of mission. The coin amount depending on how well the player has done. These coins are used to unlock new upgrades from the secret laboratory. In the laboratory you can upgrade four areas of your character based on gun skills like lowering the overheat percentage and reload speed of your weapon, driving skills that include increasing your acceleration and top speed in a vehicle and damage done by ramming. Character enhancements favour your toughness and maximum jump range. You can also boost the justice meter statistics awarding the player with more justice in their meter for ramming enemies, increasing the slowdown time and increasing the size of your justice meter to help you keep the criminals in check.

Extreme Justice also adds the a shop where you can spend stars that are unlocked in the Bounty Mode which lets you replay the story mode and adjust the difficulty level for these pointed items. Stars are also unlocked in the Challenges Mode which are little challenges taken from the story mode like ramming and destroying vehicles. The items you can purchase in the shop include cheats, movies and gang related content like character art. Finally, Extreme Justice opens the Pursuit Force for multiplayer. Supporting four modes, Ram Jam, Cops and Robbers, Deathmatch Rampage and Survivor, Extreme Justice increases its value because surprisingly each mode is a lot of fun. Either driving with a friend as he mans the turret and you drive, or going all out against each other there is some fun to be had with friends.

All things considered Extreme Justice is more of what was good about the original effort by BigBig Studios, however there are some kinks that could have been worked out. Most notable is the difficulty level, I found Extreme Justice to be a lot more difficult than the original game and I would have like more choices for difficulty levels. The jump mechanic in Extreme Justice also seems to be a bit off, I could have swore a hundred times that I was close enough to jump on a vehicle and yet no icon appeared, or it took a little too long to pop up given the fast momentum of the gameplay. Hopefully BigBig can fix some of the problem areas when Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice gets released to the PS2 later this year.

Pursuit Force increases the action and goes more over-the-top in Extreme Justice. BigBig Studios has adjusted the gameplay slightly enough to add new elements while keeping the same fast paced action a focus. New game modes including a fun selection of multiplayer games with wider variety of vehicles and missions should be enough to hook fans into the cops and robbers action for another round. If you’re looking for a good looking challenging vehicle based action game for your PSP, Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice is the only way to go. Extreme Justice doesn’t leap over the original version, but it jumps far enough to make another impact.

Gameplay: 8, Graphics: 8.5, Sound: 7, Innovation: 7, Mojo: 8. Final: 7.7 / 10