Last time, we showed you the familiar faces returning to Capital City’s gang lineup. Now, meet the city’s new breed of criminal. Pursuit Force is now a team, and sports some really high tech weaponry so we thought it would be a shame not to be able to unleash justice on some equally hardcore gangs. Unlike Pursuit Force 1, EJ is story driven and each gang has a specific part to play in the plot. We wanted to make sure that each gang had clearly defined roles that make them integral to unfolding the story of the game.

The Raiders
From the outset that we wanted to include more water based vehicles in the game such as Hovercrafts so we came up with various ideas for a ‘Water Based’ gang. The team also wanted to include a bayou style region so brainstorming began for the gang with quite clear goals in terms of what we wanted to achieve. We wanted the Raiders to have the ‘Transport Pirate’ theme of the gang in Fast and Furious and at the same time they needed to have the insane drive of the gangs in Mad Max. A stereotypical ‘Deep South’ mentality seemed to fit the Mad Max style remit and we instilled the ‘Fast and Furious’ theme throughout their vehicles, behaviour and transport targets. The result is that we have a gang who have super cool vehicles and a rabid ferocity to achieve their goals. A subtle mix of humour blended with a deadly menace, these guys are intense and relentless.

The Syndicate
Being a British developer we had always toyed with the idea of having a home brewed gang, but during conception of the first game there were a wide variety of ‘Brit Films’ on the market and we felt that the medium had been somewhat saturated. During the early stages of Pursuit Force EJ our external producer raised the idea again, so we decided to explore it. And in keeping with the ‘Tongue in Cheek’ nature of the game we knew we didn’t want to do a stereotypical ‘Meathead’ gang. We thought it would be cool to have a stylish gang that didn’t take itself too seriously, mixing elements of the thieves in ‘Pink Panther’ with the more comical ways in which people in other countries see our various diverse mix of culture. A gang that was responsible for the heist of London’s Millennium Dome, coupled with their legendary ability to remain in the public eye but never get caught, made them a intoxicating mix of working man’s hero and gentleman thief.

American Intelligence has been gathering intelligence over the last year. The reports aren’t good, a storm is brewing over Capital City and the Mayor has been made aware of the incoming hurricane of crime. Petrified by the vision of a City once again in chaos, the Mayor has decide to create a new elite police unit. And this is how Viper was born.

We loved the idea of creating a new police force that was the Ying to Pursuit Force’s Yang. A brutal police unit specialising in Riot Control. We wanted them to overshadow Pursuit Force (and when you play the game you will see why) in terms of their high tech vehicles and equipment and in their merciless tactics. A ‘Zero Tolerance’ unit that would roll over anyone including Pursuit Force to see their law enforced. The unit is loosely based on Police units that are already operational in various countries around the world. The question is, how far will they go to enforce their own brand of justice?

This time Pursuit Force is on the ropes and once again the city needs a hero!

With PF:EJ hitting stores this Tuesday, January 29th, it’s time to tell you more about Pursuit Force, Capital City and its Infamous Gangs…

Pursuit Force has always been about over-the-top action and larger than life characters, and Extreme Justice is no exception. We knew from the start that we wanted EJ to be bigger, badder and bolder, and our characters are a big part of this. So when we finished Pursuit Force 1 we spent a long time listening to our fan base about which characters and gangs they liked the most, and the majority seemed to go for the Warlords, Convicts and the Killer 66. The first two made it into EJ; we would have loved to see return of the Killer 66 but they didn’t quite fit into the storyline and direction that we wanted to take the new game.

I think the Convicts were popular because they were quite humorous in a psychotic way; they were also like a cross between MacGyver and The A-Team when it came to building their own crazy contraptions. And like the Warlords they had a very clear personality and focus. The Warlords’ main strengths were in their relevance to current affairs, and to some extent their “Kick Ass”, “No retreat No surrender” mantra.

For Pursuit Force EJ we wanted to boil their characters and personality down even more. We wanted to see just how far we could take them, in terms of humor, irony, and psychotic drive.

Players of the first game may remember that Hard Balls (the Convict Boss got run over by his ‘Mad Max’ styled bus) got absolutely hammered by Pursuit Force. He ended up entering prison via a wheel chair and let’s just say he was worse for wear. So we thought it would be cool to have the Convicts go to work on him whilst they were in prison, welding a steel cap to his broken head and steel brace style structures to his crushed limbs. And to top it all off, the guards attached two massive steel balls to his leg to keep him in check. This example encapsulates what we have done with the Convicts; we have focused more on what makes them tick and taken it to the max. So expect to see an even more psychotic, tooled-up and funny band of deranged misfits. And this is an example of how we have turned everything up to 11 in EJ.

We left Pursuit Force 1 on a bit of cliff hanger in regard to the Warlords. We wanted the General to survive but were unsure of how we could bring the gang back the rest of the gang. So we thought about the General’s very patriotic and regimented character and decided that it would be very ironic and fun to have him hire his new gang from Russia. So we went about creating a gang of Cold War mercenaries led by a 5 star US general and having them ship over 1990s Soviet military technology. So we now have this strange and exciting situation in which a Cold War battle is being fought on America’s shores. It was really fun to take the gang in this direction, and now the gang oozes “Raw Warfare” and brings back a sense of what made the Cold War so deadly and yet so utterly insane. So be prepared to battle on a huge Soviet Tank and take to the fight to skies at 25,000 feet on a gigantic long range nuclear bomber (nearly all the gangs have huge Boss vehicles which the player can fight on).

On Monday, we’ll have details (and videos) on the two new gangs rampaging through Capital City – and the elite new police unit challenging Pursuit Force with their own merciless brand of law enforcement.