Five vicious gangs with a penchant for high speed vehicles are running amuck in Capital City. To deal with this threat the city has created a new special unit within the police force known as the Pursuit Force. You are the star officer assigned to this force and it is your job to chase down these criminal elements and take them out by any means necessary. Fast cars, high-speed chases, and plenty of weapons … yeah, it’s good to be a Capital City cop…

Chasing down the Warlords.

Pursuit Force is all about over-the-top action and it does a good job of delivering it because it never takes itself too seriously. Everything is over-blown and over-acted and the laws of physics take a beating, but that’s the whole point. The game’s unique play mechanic is the ability to jump between cars chasing each other at breakneck speeds after all, but more on that later. First let’s take a look at the game’s five delightfully clichéd and cheesy gangs…

First off we have the Capellis, the local crime family and sure to be subject of angry letters from the Italian-American Anti-Defamation League. Next there are the Warlords, paramilitary types with a penchant for yelling out clichéd macho phrases while they shoot at you with a variety of big guns from their well-stocked arsenal. The Convicts are gruff and violent thugs so keen to make mayhem that they haven’t bothered to take the time to change out of their orange jumpsuits after breaking out of prison. The Killer 66 are your typical Far Eastern crime gang skilled in martial arts. Lastly there are the Vixens, former stunt women who are as hot as they are deadly.

The game consists of thirty missions divided equally between the five gangs. The missions are all independent of each other and an assortment of new missions becomes unlocked each time you successfully complete a few missions. You can play the open missions in any order and even return to completed missions in an attempt to improve your score. Initially only Cappelli and Warlord missions will be available, but you’ll soon unlock missions for each gang. It’s a nice touch that the game does not force you to complete every mission related to a gang before you’re allowed to take on one of the other gangs. The episodic nature of the missions give the game an action TV-series feel – This week on Pursuit Force: our hero must escort a stool pigeon to the airport, but the Cappellis are out to deep six this bird before he gets his wings!

Most of the missions feature high speed car chases, but there are a healthy dose of speedboat missions, and a few missions will have you doing other things like fighting a gun battle on foot or manning a helicopter-mounted machine gun. Some are even a mix of these elements, like one in which you race your car to an industrial area, fight your way on foot to a dock, and then jump into a boat and speed down a river. Control for all of this action is very smooth and responsive and perfect for the arcade racer nature of the game. There is a problem with backing up though, which is something that you’ll need to do if you run your car or boat into an obstacle on the path. There is a slight delay before you’ll actually switch to reverse and the timing is so tight in the missions that if you’re faced with having to back up to get around an obstacle then you’ve basically lost the mission.

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