Scarface: The World is Yours Review

8.0

Format Xbox

Developer Radical Entertainment

Publisher Vivendi

Genre Action

4 Comments

This is not another GTA clone. Let's clear that up right now. This is Scarface. It won't make you feel like a granny-punching hip-hop-loving gangster; it'll make you feel like Tony f***ing Montana. This is every fan of the film's dream come true.

On the face of things, you drive freely around an urban environment partaking in various illegal activities, and you can't be blamed for comparing it to GTA on that score. But this is a very different experience. All the urban games out there are about being 'gangster', and yet in every single one you follow the orders of another person. Tell us, how any earth is that muthaf****** gangsta in any way? Tony Montana, on the other hand, only takes orders from one person - himself. In this game, YOU'RE the boss. And it's all about giving Sosa, Tony's arch enemy, the boot and taking over the underworld of Miami City.

You should know the story by now. In the original, much-loved Scarface film, Tony Montana (played by Al Pacino, in case you've been in a cave for 20 years) goes from being a small-time street dealer to becoming Miami's biggest crime lord, owning a huge mansion and living the high life. But his success comes to a bitter end when a rival drug lord named Sosa sends his men to kill an increasingly coked-up and paranoid Tony at his mansion. It is in this famous shootout at the end of the film that Tony is taken out big style.

This shootout marks the start of the videogame, and what an awesome ten minutes of gaming this is. You take control of a delirious Tony Montana, who brandishes a massive machine gun, and you shoot the crap out of dozens of gangsters as they pour into your mansion. The action in this opening scene is so intense, loud and brutal, that it won't fail to put a smile on your face.

Attackers rush at you like a swarm of killer ants and you mow them down with crazy amounts of bullets, with blood spraying all over the place and the walls getting chipped to bits like that office shootout in The Matrix. But unlike The Matrix, there are no girly slow-motion cartwheels here - just raw shooting fury as Tony yanks the trigger on his 'little friend' and yells the most offensive language you've ever heard in a videogame, (no, mums and dads, this is not a game for little Johnny).

The 'Taunt' feature helps to make all the brutality even more satisfying. After killing an enemy, tapping the B button will prompt Tony to shout his verbal filth in a voice that sounds astonishingly like Al Pacino in the film. These taunts help to fill a Rage power bar, that, when full, goes into Blind Rage mode. This comes in handy during hectic gun battles - Blind Rage switches the game to a first-person view and Tony gets momentary invincibility as you blast enemies with an infinite supply of bullets. Oh, and listen to Tony swearing like an old park drinker. You will LOVE that bit.

So, you escape the house alive (assuming you have the gaming skill to pass the first part), essentially changing the final scenes of the film. But with no money, no drugs and no business, Tony is back to square one... a nobody pandejo. Now it's your job to do exactly what he did in the film - build a crime empire and work your way to the top. But this isn't all about being gangster. It's about being Tony Montana. Radical has gone all out to recreate not just the likeness, but the whole persona of Tony Montana in this game.

Everything is spot-on - the arrogant swagger in his walk, the way he leans his head and flicks his arms as he talks business and even the way he leans back to blast enemies with a machine gun. It's almost as if the sprit of Tony Montana is trapped inside some digital code.

Vocals are a big part of what Tony Montana is all about. Scarface is one of the most quotable films ever made, and the game really plays on that. We're not talking about loads of cheap and badly-used sound bites stolen from the film - we're talking hours of newly recorded speech that totally brings the character to life. There must be hours of it and it all sounds exactly like the real man. Apart from the brilliantly-voiced cut scenes, you can hit B in numerous situations to get Tony ranting on in his moody Cuban accent.

You can have conversations with the general public; from asking some hot girl out for a night of 'fun' or telling some dude you hate his sense of fashion. You can't choose what you say, or how you reply - you just hit B to speak and listen to the foul-mouthed hilarity - but every conversation is uncannily relevant. If you speak to some bloke in a night club, it'll be about the music, the way he's dancing or the quality of the ladies on offer. If you speak to a weirdo on the street, Tony will tell him exactly what he thinks of him with brutal honesty. It's this attention to detail that really gives the game an impression of authenticity, actually feeling like an extension of the film rather than a cheap movie-licence cash-in.

Running around chatting up ladies and swearing at random blokes is all good fun, but we weren't getting very far so after a few hours of boyish swearing hilarity, we had to turn our attention to the actual game scenario. Tony's main objective is to take over each of the four sectors of Miami City by buying all of the local businesses and flushing out all the rival gangs one-by-one. How do you do that? Simple - you sell drugs. This game is all about the yeyo. But the cool thing is, it doesn't just have you completing a list of missions for some mastermind criminal, like GTA. Scarface cuts much deeper than that, and does its best to absorb you into the complete lifestyle of a drug trafficker, which is far more involving than doing drive-bys and blowing people up.

First you sell yeyo in small quantities to back alley dealers, buy a few small shops and bars (to serve as drug outlets) and grow your profits. Then you move onto the big stuff, smuggling large amounts of drugs from offshore islands into Miami City via boat, dodging drug watch patrol boats and fighting off rival gangs. This is what makes Scarface a completely different game to GTA.

The experience stays pretty consistent all the way through - your activities at the start of the game don't differ massively to the missions near the end, they just get harder. But in Scarface, your whole situation changes as you get richer and more powerful. At first, you'll value a deal that lands you $10,000, as you rush from one street to the next to sell your small packages to moody dealers and avoiding police cars. Not to mention the fact that no-one gives a damn who you are, and the ladies won't tolerate your smooth talk.

Later in the game, when you're as rich as Bill Gates, all the ladies will love you, and people on the street will stop to say hello. You won't have time for street punks and small-time sellers - you'll be meeting serious dealers on their private islands for pick-ups worth millions of dollars. Once the drugs are in the city and safely in your storehouse, it's not the police you have to worry about but rival gangs that'll give you troubles. You distribute the drugs between your shops and other purchased businesses - called fronts - by car as rival gangs chase you, hoping to kill you and make off with your stash. These gangs will even attack your fronts, and you'll have moments to get there and kill them all before they completely wreck your business. Up-and-coming crime lords don't get a moment to rest.

It's not just protecting your fronts that you have to worry about - there are so many variables in this game that affect your progress, and the way the city treats you. Cop Heat is the obvious one - a measurement of how wanted you are with the police. Every wrong move you make, from as little as stealing a car to as serious as killing someone, will raise your Cop Heat. The higher your Cop Heat, the harder they'll chase you when they finally catch you doing something wrong. Although, being Montana, you can sometimes bribe the meddling feds to make them forget what they saw.

Then there's Gang Heat, which is similar but applies to the feelings of other gangs towards you. If you go around killing gang members and drug dealers, you'll really piss them off. You don't want this because not only will they come after you and your fronts, but you'll also have an impossible time trying to sell drugs because dealers will refuse to work with you.

So you have to keep everyone sweet, which forces you to play the game properly rather than running amok like you do in other urban games, without a care in the world. And you will care about how well Tony does because, as we said before, this game is all about the lifestyle of Tony Montana, and you'll be totally absorbed in it. Keep business running smoothly and the dollars will start rolling in. Once you get the money, you get the power, the girls and everything else you could imagine Montana would like. The Exotics catalogue is where you'll go to splash some serious cash on the sort of luxuries that makes Montana who he is.

You can go all Sims-like and deck your mansion out with classy furniture, including a large cigar case, a big office chair (we think a throne is more suitable), or fancy pots containing the ashes of Manny (his partner in crime in the film) and Gina (his murdered sister). That's all cosmetic stuff. You can spend your money on more constructive things like hiring Henchmen (ruthless cold blooded types) to do Tony's dirty work and odd jobs. You can buy faster cars (it's no PGR but the car handling is very playable), flashy boats, and powerful guns. All these things cost loads but you'll work hard to afford them because hitting the 'Buy' option and blowing a million dollars on a kick-ass car, or whatever, will make you feel like a king.

But we have one major gripe with the game's focus on money-saving - your activities required to get large amounts of money can get repetitive. When you're a small-time crook the tasks required to earn money and buy establishments quickly becomes a bit of a tiresome cycle that you simply have to repeat over and over. You complete a small mission to make contact with a supplier. Then you buy drugs from the supplier, run from dealer to dealer (who all look disappointingly identical) until all your drugs are sold, then repeat the whole process until you have enough to buy the fronts. When you move up in the game, the cycle changes slightly (you move on to boats and major importing deals), but the repetitiveness remains.

If you're the kind of gamer that can't stand doing any one task more than once or twice, you won't get far with Scarface. But on the other hand, if you're the type that doesn't mind a bit of virtual hard graft to achieve a greater goal, you will be driven on by the satisfying sense of progression.

It's not just repetition in the missions that you'll come across. The game also repeats citizen models to such a relentless extent, it's almost as if Tony lives in a city of clones, which goes a long way to ruin the illusion of the city. After all that the gameplay does to absorb you into a believable world, this cloning will always remind you that you're playing a darned videogame.

So Scarface lacks a little cosmetic polish, and can be a tad on the repetitive side. But for the hours we spent absorbed by its massively in-depth gameplay and fantastic recreation of the Montana character, it hardly mattered. Urban game fans will enjoy the freedom and multi-layered gameplay, and lovers of a good old bit of videogame violence will not find a more satisfying or brutal game than this. Get it, and get ready for a serious swear-a-thon.

Mike Jackson