ZanzibarBreeze gave surprisingly comprehensive and fair review of this title, so I'll give credit there, but the conclusion he reaches that the game is bad is somewhat disappointing. I can tell you that this is easily one of the PSP's better games. In fact his main complaint seems to be that the game is hard. Granted, the game is hard but it is not cheap difficulty as he says.
On top of that the game is actually easier than the first Pursuit Force. This is perhaps the result of the fact that the Justice meter no longer has to be full in order to be used to replenish health. In way this makes you invincible since earning even a sliver of justice will keep you alive, especially considering the fact that all vehicles once destroyed have a grace period of about 5-10 seconds before they actually explode, giving you plenty of time to earn justice and then use the justice (thereby resetting the timer) or to simply jump to another vehicle. (even a civilian vehicle)
So if you think Extreme Justice is hard, learn the mechanics before you bash it! And play the first Pursuit Force, then you'll know what hard is.
Mind you he does attempt to give a fair review, but below I will respond some parts of his review.
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"The game only checkpoints when the mode of gameplay in a level changes -- for example, there will be a checkpoint in between a shift from helicopter to car, and then a checkpoint from the car to on-foot, but there won’t be a checkpoint in the middle of that ten minute car section, so if one fails half-way through it’s necessary to sit the entire section over."
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The checkpoints are not that far apart from each other. Most sections between checkpoints don't last 10 minutes or anywhere near that long.
Thin is, the checkpoints occur when gameplay changes. For instance if you go from driving to on-foot gameplay, that will be a checkpoint. They also occur when mandatory vehicle changes occur. (such as car to boat) This is a very sensible way to place checkpoints instead of having them spread out randomly.
Even if there were more checkpoints, there would be two disadvantages to this. For one thing it would increase the likelyhood of having to start a mission over because you screwed up in the preceding part of the mission and want a do-over. The other disadvantage is that it would allow the player to too easily exploit the checkpoints, replaying each piece of the mission over and over until they perfected it. This is actually part of the game when attaining high scores, but adding too many checkpoints would make it a bit too degenerate since there would be no reason not to do every segment perfectly.
But in any case I fail to see the problem. The checkpoints are not that far apart. If you blow up near the end of a mission just try not to blow up next time or have more justice saved up.
Thing is the game's difficulty really comes from attaining 9-star scores in each mission. If you can't even complete the levels normally (which isn't hard) without caring about score, then there is probably just some misunderstanding about how to play the game. (Namely the justice system which, as stated at the start of this review, is kind of weird in this game compared to the first Pursuit Force, since you can sort of cheat it, and this method of using the justice meter is possibly required.)
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"“Casual” is apparently for people who “Don’t play many games”, but anybody choosing this difficulty is liable to not make it past Act I. “Experienced” and “Hardcore”, means that you “Play games often” and “Play games whenever you can” respectively. Setting aside the fact that “Casual” for Pursuit Force is closer to what is on average ‘Hard’ for other video games, what the titles are associated with is completely ludicrous. How often people play video games has no correlation with how good at video games they may be."
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Okay well this is a point where I agree with. The names and descriptions of the difficulty levels in Pursuit Force Extreme Justice are incredibly silly indeed.. But I'd like to use this point to address a broader issue, the major problem in Pursuit Force Extreme Justice is not is the names of the difficult levels but the fact that you're not able to switch difficulty level after choosing one.
This is especially odd considering the fact that completing the story unlocks a score attack mission mode where you can replay any mission on any difficulty, and you are even awarded points depending on the difficulty you picked. This means that even if you chose easy mode, you'd have to play through the missions on hard difficulty eventually anyway, so there's no reason not to have chosen easy mode in the first place.
The names of the difficulty levels aren't so much the problem. Difficulty levels named "easy" "normal" "hard" are just as much a flawed, inane concept as being named "casual" "experienced" "hardcore". Obviously what's easy for one person may not be easy for another, and obviously the difficulty varies from game to game. (Just because a difficulty setting is the easiest difficulty setting offered by that particular game, does not in itself mean it is "Easy". One game's "Normal" might be another game's "Hard" which might be another game's "Easy". And difficulty is subjective, obviously an experienced gamer would find "Easy" beating a boss that an inexperienced gamer would find "Hard".) It is also incredibly inane that any game would make you pick difficulty right when starting the game, before you have even played it and therefore couldn't possibly assess its difficulty. The only difficulty setting that makes sense is one you can change later, or one where you prompted to choose before each level/mission. In fact, many games already do this.
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"There’s nothing in Extreme Justice that one hasn’t seen before in early PlayStation 2 games. The environments whizz past hastily, but the player will notice that there are only five or six different building models, and only three or four different environments: the city, the rural parts of the city, a marsh, and a river."
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The visuals are fine and if not pretty good by PSP standards. Keep in mind the courses span multiple segments, and switch gameplay styles, for instance a car chase, then helicopter chase, then car chase again, transitioning seamlessly from one to the next.. this is not somewhat impressive? They are essentially open world in length, on top of that, each vehicle has multiple characters that shoot at you, can jump from the vehicle or fall out when they die, and the vehicles themselves take visible damage. You drive at very high speeds, and the framerate is consistent. The game doesn't even look bad. Framerate is a big issue for me but this title's framerate I found perfectly tolerable and it's probably no worse than the Burnout Legends for PSP.
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"I was shot at on two different occasions by my buddy AI characters because they failed to recognize that it was me, not a hostile, piloting a gang vehicle."
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Never happened to me. As someone who 100 percented the game, I can tell you that buddy AI characters definitely get in the way (by stealing kills thereby hurting your score, and by shooting enemy vehicles you intend to hijack, resulting in you hijacking an already damaged vehicle) but as far as I have observed it is not even possible for them to shoot you. I am guessing were probably shot at by an enemy you didn't notice was there, or took more damage than you realized.
[Speaking of which, since writing this I've played the original Pursuit Force again (great game by the way) and I noticed that when you shoot a civilian vehicle, it says "Friendly Fire" and you lose justice. The term Friendly Fire in this case is of course is referring to YOU shooting a civilian, not the action of any AI buddy characters.]
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"Other members of the Pursuit Force lay into a wimpy scientist, named Dr. Pertwee (who is helping the Pursuit Force make grounds against the enemy) with phrases such as the following: 'Speak English, four eyes' (when the scientist uses grade-six level English), and 'Shut up, Geek!'"
I think the dialogue is meant to be silly.