Pursuit Force

Pursuit Force E3 2005 Preshow Hands-On

During Sony Computer Entertainment Europe's pre-E3 press conference in Los Angeles this afternoon, we had our first opportunity to get hands-on with Pursuit Force. Currently in development at Bigbig Games, Pursuit Force is an action-packed driving game in which you'll assume the role of a pursuit force police officer charged with cleaning up the gang-infested streets of five different districts within a fictional North American state.

You'll start many of Pursuit Force's 30 missions behind the wheel of your sporty-looking cop car, and you'll be armed with a pistol that you can fire out of your window when you get within range of the gang members and criminals that you're pursuing. You'll see an auto-aiming crosshair pop up on your screen when you get close to your targets, and then you can just unload bullets into their vehicles until they're destroyed. Sounds like a lot of fun, right? We haven't even gotten to the good stuff yet.

If the criminals you're chasing are driving a better vehicle than you are, and you'd rather get behind the wheel of it yourself than blow it up, then you can do exactly that. By driving extremely close to one of the cars belonging to the Vixens gang (one of five very different gangs that you'll be up against), we were able to jump out of our vehicle and onto the hood of theirs. We didn't have to worry about timing the jump exactly or anything, since an icon flashes up in the center of the screen to let you know when it's safe.

Once we were on the hood of the car, the camera switched around to a view of us looking back at the driver and passenger inside the car as they took turns leaning out of their windows and shooting at us. We were able to return fire, of course, and we were also able to evade their shots by rolling down the hood and hugging the front bumper. All of this was happening as the Vixens' car sped along a highway in a Los Angeles-style environment, and we were quite relieved when, after killing both of the car's occupants, we were able to get behind the wheel of the distinctive gang car.

On this occasion, the handling of the car we climbed into wasn't radically different from the cop car that we'd climbed out of moments earlier, but we did notice that our pistol was replaced with a machine gun, which made destroying the remaining Vixens cars on the highway a lot easier. Pursuit Force will feature around 50 different vehicles in total, including sports cars, SUVs, trucks, motorcycles, and a bunch more that Bigbig is keeping quiet about for the moment. A minimum of 25 different weapons are also planned for the game, although other than the pistol and the machine gun that we got to play with, no more specific information has been made available at this time.

After we successfully took care of the three Vixens cars (which our mission briefing required us to do), we were treated to a brief cutscene that ended as our character leapt out of his car and onto a low-flying helicopter. We then found ourselves firing a turret-mounted minigun from the side of the helicopter as it flew over the highway, affording us some clear shots at a second group of Vixens cars. The Bigbig representative that we'd been talking to told us that this surprising (and very enjoyable) change of gameplay is typical of just about every level in Pursuit Force, though the surprises will be different, of course. We were told about a couple of others that were actually quite ingenious, but to tell you about them at this point would be to risk spoiling the surprise for you.

The second level that we actually got to play started us out behind the wheel of a large truck, which, unsurprisingly, handled very differently to the cars that we'd been driving previously. The environment in which this level took place was composed mostly of forest areas and large caves that we could drive through. Our initial objective on this occasion was much the same as that in the previous level, but before we got too comfortable with that idea we were given a bit of a shock when one of the Vixens gang members leapt out of her car and landed on the roof of our truck. We weren't able to shoot at her, so the only way to get rid of her was to shake her off by weaving from side to side--preferably avoiding any innocent traffic in the process.

Since Pursuit Force sees you playing as a cop, it should come as no surprise that the game rewards you for not harming innocent civilians as you go about your business. Your reward takes the form of a "justice meter" that fills up gradually as you complete your objectives without causing any harm to innocent people. When the justice meter is full, you have the option to use a slow-motion feature the next time you jump between two vehicles, which looks extremely cool and actually lets you take a few shots at your target vehicle's occupants as you float through the air.

Our time with the E3 version of Pursuit Force ended with a boss encounter against a gang member in a helicopter. The gameplay was reminiscent of the boss encounters in classic shooters, in so much as we spent around half of our time avoiding the helicopter's attacks, and the other half returning fire whenever our enemy momentarily lost control.

In case you haven't guessed already, we had a lot of fun with Pursuit Force. The game is currently scheduled for release in Europe toward the end of this year, and it is already looking as smooth as it plays. We have no way of knowing if Pursuit Force has already been signed for North America, but we'd be extremely surprised if this very promising game doesn't make it across the pond at some point.

We'll bring you more information on Pursuit Force as soon as it becomes available.