the early psp was in many cases very impressive for its time, a lot of its games really feel like lower resoliton ps2 games with a more portable friendly structure and persuit force feels like a perfect distilation of this. pursuit force is a racing? shooter? car combat? kinda game, it's a lot of things and it combined a few genres in one, you got full on race missions, missions where you have to take down cars and even some boat and on foot missions, it has some of the most variety ive ever seen in a game based around cars. it's set up around one central mechanic, car jumping, very similar to sleeping dogs or VIN DIESEL'S WHEELMAN in that you can jump to and highjack cars, though in pursuit force you also have to, unless it's a civilian car, take out the people in it so you can use the car and it's surprisingly hard to do, your basic gun doesnt do much damage and it means that doing this can be really tense and dangerous, but it's a neat idea and it sets it apart from those games, but you do regain full health of your car by doing this so its a risky tradeoff that means you have to manage how much both health bars mean to you, the other mechanics go with this pretty well, you can ram into other cars for damage and also shoot them from your seat, you even accumulate a special meter that can be used for mid air shooting while jumping from cars or for a full health refill for both your bars, though i dont feel like the game gives you enough of this bar. the guns and handeling feel great too, you can get temporary guns by stealing cars and as you go up in ranks you even unlock more basic guns for use, from a 3 shot gun to a magnum and every faction even gets their own guns and cars, though some arent great like the convicts nailgun which i found was worse than my starting pistol. there's even boss fights! every faction gets 2 and they can range from turret bosses to chasing them in a car and they're a lot of fun, if very difficult. the game in general is very difficult because of things like this piling up, your cars get destroyed quite quick and the time limits are often very strict, i had to play with rewinds on as i found it much too difficult without, it even took me multiple times to even beat the tutorial mission, i would advise to play with at least save states as the game is brutally difficult without assistance and is one of the few aspects i didnt enjoy.

there was also one major other aspect of the game that i did not enjoy, the writing, while you got some funny quotable lines from the commissioner and the villains and one very memorable name in the form of "hard balls" (yeah you can tell the game is british), the writing all around feels a little ick a lot of the time, from the cop worship to the just, outright misogyny in the vixens chapter "don't get cocky cuz they're chicks" is a real line in this game and it's disgusting, if this is too much for you, i would reccomend skipping the game, for as much fun as i did have with the gameplay, the game can be a little iffy with its steriotypes too. but back to the stuff that's great! the soundtrack here is super fun, it's like a cheesy B-movie score but not boring like a lot of movie scores tend to be, i think this is because it was done by the amazingly talented richard jacques, known for sonic R and 3D blast as well as a ton of other projects, odd's are you've heard his music before. it also looks great! like i said at the start it absolutely looks console quality and it has some really high speeds it can get up to, the designs are a little on the boring side but there's enough variety in them that it doesn't get too stale at least and you even has some variety in the kinds of vehicles you get, from supercars to busses and bikes. the length is pretty perfect for the game too, you can easily do it in two sittings if you want but as a portable game it's great, the structure fits it well with the missions usually being under 5 mins, though the difficulty means you'll be replaying them a lot.

the game would have a sequel several years later in the form of PURSUIT FORCE EXTREME JUSTICE, a game that reportedly is much easier and a more fun, accessable experiance but one i have not tried yet, bigbig themselves sadly wouldn't go on to do much, with only the games sequel, the fantastic motorstorm arctic edge and the (imo) fantastic little deviants for the vita on their resume before sony shut them down in 2012 after little deviants did not sell well. being one of many promising studios that sony had shuttered and will be missed.