YMMV / Pursuit Force

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Ashley is the squad member who gives you the least flak in combat, frequently uses herself as bait so you can snipe enemies (clumsily) from afar and helps with the most important or dangerous missions, and your revenge for Sarah. Judging from what she is willing to do in these missions to fight crime and her trust in you, her defection to the Vipers in the end is more likely out of her genuine sense of duty than power hunger like Decker.
• Awesome Music: The Vipers' Theme is a descend-into-madness Fallen Hero theme.
  • The other gang themes aren't bad either. The Warlords' Theme sounds like something straight out a spy thriller, the Convicts' Theme is much more hectic and fits their chaotic nature, and the Raiders' Theme is just tense action-packed goodness you'd expect from a series like this.
• Base-Breaking Character: Lucy from Extreme Justice. She is either considered a shallow replacement for Sarah or a pretty adequate Action Girl who has her own Character Development and quirky personality.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Given his overall design and personality, Decker being the Big Bad of Extreme Justice wasn't exactly hard to figure out.
• Complete Monster:
  • Ric Jigsawn is "The General" of the Warlords, willing to cause mass destruction for the sake of delusional payback. Formerly a Vietnam vet who led his Rhino Squad to pillage and slaughter several Vietnamese villages to snuff out the Viet Cong, Jigsawn and his men were arrested for their crimes, with an escaped Jigsawn vowing revenge for the imprisonment of his soldiers. Threatening Capital State multiple times with nukes, toxic nerve gas, and more, Jigsawn even holds an entire bus of innocents hostage when his lieutenant is killed, and hypocritically leaves his own men to be arrested in order to hide out in Cuba. Returning to help Commander Decker drop nukes on Capital City, Jigsawn leads the warheads' creation and threatens the entire city with unleashing them all across the state unless they receive payment. Jigsawn later decides to drop a nuke on the city ahead of schedule, deliberately going against Decker's orders with hopes of using the city's destruction to teach America a lesson.
  • DeSean "Hard Balls" Jones is the leader of the Convicts. Arrested for a litany of murders, primarily of cops and innocents, Hard Balls busts out of jail and allows his convicts to cause all kinds of mayhem as he attempts to escape Capital City. Breaking out of prison to help Decker with his plan to nuke the city, Hard Balls has his men crash Commander and Sarah's wedding with hopes of killing many there, kidnaps a physicist to build the warheads, and allows his henchman Billy Wilde to stir up trouble at an oil refinery that would've resulted in numerous lives lost. To create a distraction for Pursuit Force, Hard Balls uses the Demolisher to try and lay waste to Alpine Town, just so Decker's plan can come to fruition.
  • Extreme Justice only: Commander Andy Decker is the leader of Viper Squad, and the true brains behind the plot. A Knight Templar who values his ego over the lives of his own people, Decker has every criminal gang in Capital City craft him nuclear warheads to drop on the city, hoping to swoop in, stop them, and come out as the hero, thereby gaining enough power to turn the city into a Police State, even having Pursuit Force's HQ blown up with hope of killing everybody inside. Allowing criminals to cause havoc to look good for the public, even forming a gang of his own who try to flood the whole city, when the General attempts to destroy Capital City ahead of schedule, Decker kills him, goes insane, and orders his men to lay waste to the entire city. This includes attempting to assassinate the visiting President to cause widespread panic, poisoning the city's water supply, and raiding a hospital with thousands inside. Decker's attempt to flee sees him trying to drop a nuke on the city to reduce it all to ash, believing that if he can't have the city, nobody can.
• Even Better Sequel: Extreme Justice toned down the original's Nintendo Hard difficulty, improved the gameplay by offering more elaborate levels and boss fights, and replaced the original's Excuse Plot with a more complex narrative that has some Tear Jerker moments.
• Evil Is Cool: All of the gangs are this. Whether it's the Raiders, Convicts, Warlords, Vixens, Killer 66, Capellis, Syndicate, or even Viper Squad, fans of the series will have at least one gang they like, usually for how deliciously hammy they are, or just their general aesthetic.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Extreme Justice ends with the Commander throwing away his badge and quitting Pursuit Force, but the Chief is assured that he will return. However the developer Bigbig Studios was closed by Sony in 2012, and the series laid dormant ever since.
• Narm Charm: The story and characters are what you'd expect from a typical blockbuster action film, and the dialogue is extremely cheesy. That being said, it's sheer hamminess is what makes the series so memorable and charming, and the storylines (Especially in the case of Extreme Justice) are still pretty interesting to play through with memorable characters and lots of twists.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Extreme Justice is quite a bit easier than the original, though the unlockable Iron Man difficulty is meant to emulate the difficulty of the first.
• TearJerker:
  • Sarah's death and her subsequent funeral at the end of Act 1. The Warlord Lieutenant shoots her helicopter with his sniper rifle, causing it to crash and explode. The Commander, who was up to this point The Stoic, screams his wife's name out in anguish shortly before he falls in the water, almost drowning himself. And if the opening to the funeral cutscene is to believe, he could very well have crossed Despair Event Horizon and knowingly die while underwater.
  • The Pursuit Force headquarters getting bombed by the Vipers. Miraculously, the Chief survives, but ends up in the hospital. The true horror comes from the documents he picked up just before the explosion. Said documents? They indicate that the Pursuit Force have The Mole inside. The Commander realizes this and upon hearing the Chief's order to take care of the problem he replies that he will. And even Lucy herself ends up having a small Heroic BSoD at the realization.
  • The reveal of Ashley being the Viper's Lieutenant.
  • The ending. While the Vipers are down for good, the Commander and the Chief visit Sarah's grave, after which the Commander puts his badge and his gun on her tombstone and quits his job. The Chief's reassurance that he will be back became even worse once the studio behind the game went bankrupt.
• That One Level: The second Vixen mission in the first game requires you to take out seven targets before they reach the end of the level, which is pretty par for the course by the time it comes up. The problem is that most of the targets are bikers, which means that you don't get a lot of your extreme meter build up for taking them out (the extreme meter is used for healing, among other things), they move very fast, taking them out without jumping on the cars takes forever, taking them out by jumping on the cars slows them down, and the level is surprisingly short, with a lot of hard turns (requiring slowing down) and the Vixens are driving fast vehicles. Taking out six of the targets before the end of the level is tough enough, but taking out seven is excruciating. And good luck doing it in the original European version that lack checkpoints, forcing you to do it in one go.

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