Scarface: The World Is Yours review

A game based on the film Scarface. Let’s just do a quick checklist for what may make it good. Violence, check. That’s pretty much all we really need to create free roaming sandbox (yes another) city based action. Without wanting to spoil the film, which certainly improves the game experience by characterising the people involved in the story a little better, the game begins at the end of the film, with an alternate ending for you to play through. From there, Al Pacino’s likeness, Tony Montana loses everything, and must rebuild his empire through a selection of naughtily themed drug selling, gang killing, police aggravating missions.

Clearly borrowing more than a few elements from the ever comparable Grand Theft Auto series (no bad thing as we are all aware), the themes fit beautifully into a game about Miami’s underworld. Already selling by the bucket load, the game gives you a driving/shooting overview of the gameplay styles we have become so familiar with and twists them in its own clever style to give us all something new.

A day in the life of…

While the objective of the game is to regain the city as your own territory, the methods for this are the unique aspect of the game. Sure, you’ve got the gang wars to pinch a slight foothold on the place (and a few extra percent), but the big bucks are in property. To buy property, firstly you must convince the owner that you are the right person to sell it to, by achieving some clever task for them, be it wiping out their enemies, collecting valuable documents from someone fleeing you by boat or hiding merchandise from the cops. The missions do seem varied, though tend to lie on the conventional side of these style of games. Very little new here besides the movie licence.

Once the owner is on your side, you merely have to fork out the dough, which is where Scarface seems to have it right. Money really matters in this game. Earning it is part of the challenge, with leads for drugs suppliers being mini-missions in themselves, and selling them to dealers on the street a minigame that can only be described as a golf game meter. Hitting the circle button at the right point in the ‘swing’ to determine the best price for you is one of the many uses this meter has, in an attempt to give everything you do come kind of control. It is even used to try and reduce the amount of heat the cops have on you, if they stop you in the street on suspicion of running that old lady down.

Money Money Money

The fabled golf meter is also used for your trading with banks, as your hard earned (looks a lot easier than my job) cash from drugs trafficking must be laundered (in case of a run in with the law), which your friendly local bank will do for a small fee; the percentage of which is determined once again, by metaphorically putting on par. Saving your game is also achieved through these banks, serving as a one stop shop for relaxing slightly until your next mission.

The game proceeds through as your reputation increases through its levels, ably provided by the letters making up ‘Scarface’. To increase your rep, besides killing gangs and taking over property, you can also buy items for your home to kit it out more stylishly, making it very easy to spend all of your money on these collectable exotic items, giving you a further incentive to continue. (Not to mention purchasing cars, hiring a driver and sitting back, letting him take you around in your limo.)

Tony Montana is on heat

While the game proceeds as would be expected, you can also expend your ever dwindling resources on buying off the various gangs of the street, and bribing cops to pay attention to you less. The heat system (one for gang heat and one for cop heat) lets you know how much of a target you are for each of them, and how much effort they will make to take you down. If the golf swing doesn’t land on the green, then throwing money at gangs will make less of them show up if you attack them.

If they do show up however, you are well prepared, because as those of you who have seen the film will know, Tony Montana is a rather angry person. As you proceed to kill people and perform various actions that show ‘balls’, you will get points that stack up. Near misses while driving a vehicle or even just power sliding around a corner will add to your ‘balls’ score until you top the meter and it allows you to perform a rage move. Holding circle then will send you into a first person view, give all of your weapons instant kill capabilities and reward your kills with health added to yourself. The system makes gunfights a lot more entertaining, and I must say it is the best GTA style combat system I have seen yet.

Change is/isn’t good?

The police system is unique to Scarface and involves the bar outside your map gradually filling up with white. Once it does, you are being actively hunted by the cops, rather than them giving you yet another golf sim chance to reduce your heat. It is then a case of getting away from the crime scene, a large highlighted area in your map, and hoping that the cop-cars don’t follow. If they do, you must outrun them before the map bar fills with red. If it does it’s game over. And not like ‘we’re sending two tanks, four FBI vehicles and a few choppers at you’ no chance, but like the game ends, and you are, to coin a phrase, playing ping pong without a paddle.

This auto fail ‘feature’ seems very much an attempt to bring something new to the genre, and frustrates more than it excites. The music system works slightly differently to comparable games. Instead of it being linked to the car radio stations, the music can play constantly whether on foot or in a vehicle though with plenty of recognisable music from both the film soundtrack and other sources to entertain you as you swell the underworld of the city.

On the audio side of things, the cast is excellent, with plenty of superb performances, including the actor chosen to emulate Al Pacino. While the voices may sound great, there is very little character development throughout the story, making it feel a little stale and methodical about its progression. Showing us new areas of the city is understandably exciting when it happens, but maybe the characters could have undergone a little more of a decisive evolution.

The city is slightly more confusing to navigate than many of the other city sandbox games, but fortunately you can set your own markers and arrows guide you the easiest way around (and are worth following even if you think otherwise). Ultimately, it seems like an alternate look at the game style, based on a movie licence. To be perfectly, honest, given the cliché of terrible movie tie ins, I was most impressed with Scarface on that basis alone, but it does become easier to recommend the game when you consider that Scarface: The World Is Yours would be worth a play through even without Tony Montana.