I played through the Pursuit Force demo for the Playstation Portable over the weekend. It s an OK game, but I found it a little too repetitive and simplistic for my tastes.

That's sorta funny because I was talking to someone at Sony and they told me that when the game came out in Europe it took some hits for having an overcomplicated control system. When they ported it to the U.S., I'm told, it was actually tweaked to make it easier.

Well, from what I saw, they tweaked it too much.

The demo included three levels. In each level you basically have to catch up with a string of cars and kill the drivers before they reach a specified point, usually a city of some sort.

You can just drive up behind the cars and blast away with your car, but it's an impractical method and you'll run out of time. Instead, what you really have to do is press the circle button when you are next to, behind, or in front of the car and hop from your vehicle to theirs.

Once you're riding the vehicle, you have to plug away at the driver and any passengers to kill them, then you automatically slide into the driver's seat and head off toward the next car.

Keep in mind, this all takes place at speeds of 100 mph. The problem is, the interface has been so smoothed out, that you can't really tell that you're in peril of dropping to the road and dying.

While riding the vehicle and shooting, you're supposed to use the joystick to balance yourself. I didn't realize this until half way through the second level, simply because I never had to use it.

I'm hoping they can tweak the difficulty more and perhaps add a bit more substance to the game, because as it stands it just seems like an exercise in button mashing and not a lot of fun at that.