Scarface - The World is Yours Once you get over the whole
rewriting-the-end-of-the-movie thing, Scarface: The World Is Yours is a
competent but usually uninteresting action game.
Hey, remember the movie Scarface?
How about that ending, with Tony Montana taking on an army of thugs
with his "little friend" and managing to kill most of them...except for
the guy creeping up from behind with a double-barreled shotgun? Guess he
didn't see that coming. Too bad they didn't leave it open for a sequel,
because the continuing adventures of Tony Montana probably would have
been pretty cool.
Coke deals and other character interactions are often governed by a golflike meter.
Slight variations on that conversation have probably happened thousands
of times since the 1983 release of Scarface, which featured Al Pacino as
a tough-talking up-and-coming crime lord who makes a fortune dealing
cocaine in Miami, only to lose it all by taking his eye off the ball and
becoming way too focused on getting high on his own supply. Through the
power of video game magic,
Sierra and Radical Entertainment have teamed up to answer the question:
What would have happened to Tony Montana if he had escaped from the
mansion? What about his empire? And the video game answer to that
question is that he'd lose it all and have to perform a number of Grand Theft Auto-like tasks to get it back.
Rewriting the ending to a movie just so you can justify a sequel is a
tough pill to swallow, especially when you're dealing with an ending as
memorable as the one in Scarface. It's likely that some fans of the film
will never be able to get over that hump and will despise the game for
existing in the first place. But if you can deal with that
concept--you'll take control of Montana shortly after the "say hello to
my little friend" line and orchestrate his getaway yourself--you'll find
a foul-mouthed and bloody adventure that does next to nothing with the
characters. In the film, you saw Tony Montana grow from a simple refugee
to the king of the coke world. In the game, the shock of losing his
empire causes Tony to clean up his act and get off the yayo so he can
start dealing again. Then you basically kill everyone who wronged you,
all while talking about the need to have balls. The whole experience
feels flat and often self-conscious. It's like the makers of the game
watched the movie, picked out a few common words that Tony Montana would
say (cock-a-roach, balls, f***, chico, and coño), and then set about
writing dialogue that uses those words as often as possible.
It might not feel terribly true to the spirit of the film, but as a
game, Scarface is functional. You're given the open city of Miami to
drive around right off the bat, though you'll be doing business in only
one part of the city at a time. You start in Little Havana, and your
goal is to take back that part of town so you can deal cocaine unabated
by the other dealers that have risen during your three-month absence.
You take back the streets by going to war with gangs that have taken up
residence in various parts of the neighborhood. These gangs are denoted
by a skull on your map, and your task here is to roll up to the thugs,
open fire, and not stop shooting until they're all dead. You'll also
need to buy businesses in each part of town, mainly so that you can use
them as drug fronts, and you won't able to advance the story if you
don't. But you can't just waltz in and buy each business right away.
Business owners have specific tasks that you must complete before
they'll sell. That means you'll have to go on a mission. Some of the
missions make perfect sense and fit with something Tony Montana would
do, like defending a restaurant from attackers. Another has you guarding
a speedboat from a fixed gun position on a helicopter while it tries to
find shark fins to make shark-fin soup for a wedding party at another
restaurant. The slightly goofy missions conspire to make the whole game
feel disjointed and flippant.
In addition to the main process of completing missions and buying front
businesses, there's the more open-ended goal of making money and
building a reputation. You have a reputation level that increases for a
variety of different reasons, including completing missions, and you
won't be able to take on some missions unless your reputation is at a
certain level. If you need to earn a lot of rep, that might mean you go
several hours without progressing the story because you need to earn
money to purchase junk for your mansion, which raises your rep and also
gives you access to the stupidly named "pimp my mansion" feature.
The life of a coke dealer is a dangerous one, but death in this game usually doesn't have much of a consequence.
Or, you can just go on what seems like an infinite number of side
missions to help out coke suppliers, usually by defending them from
attackers for a minute or two. Once that's done, you can get connected
with the suppliers and purchase cocaine. Grams can be dealt on your own
to street dealers or through your front businesses, though the street
dealers usually give you more money for your product. As you move up the
food chain and take over entire neighborhoods, you get access to supply
warehouses. Around that point, you can start buying by the kilo and
store those fat keys of powder in your warehouse. Once you've stored
some coke, you can then go on a distribution mission, which has you
drive around to your various front businesses, ostensibly to deliver the
coke you've accumulated. But all you really do is drive around and run
over boxes that give you money. During this process, gangs will show up
and attempt to attack or take out your front businesses, but they're
never too hard to deal with. Completing distribution is a great way to
earn a lot of cash...dirty cash.
The game keeps track of two different sums of money. Your cash on hand
is treated as dirty money, and when you die, you lose all the grams and
dirty money on your person. The only way to protect your money is to go
to a bank and launder it, which also lets you save your game. The
laundering process isn't automatic, though. Whenever you go to deposit
your cash, a golf swing-style meter appears with various percentages on
it. That percentage is how much of a cut the bank will take for cleaning
up your cash flow. You need to hold down a button to start the meter
moving and let off when it reaches a success zone at the end to get the
lowest rate. This same meter shows up throughout the game and is used to
intimidate gangs, fast-talk your way past police, sell grams of coke to
dealers, and even disarm bombs. It's a clever system that makes you
feel like you're actually working to accomplish these tasks, rather than
just pressing a button, though it's not very hard, and you'll rarely
fail once you get the hang of it. There are two other factors that
impact some of these meters. Your heat with local gangs has an impact on
how much money you'll get for selling coke to dealers, and your heat
with the police has an effect on the percentage the banks will offer to
launder your cash. You can pay either of them down with bribes, though
the best way to deal with the police is to not attract their attention
in the first place.
This may be the only game around that features something called a balls upgrade.
One of the most exhilarating parts of any Grand Theft Auto-style
game is the ability to get out in the middle of the street, arm
yourself to the teeth, and start going crazy. Scarface doesn't let you
do that, because not only can you not pull the trigger when pointing at
any civilian (the game likes to repeat the "I don't need that s*** in my
life" line from the movie when you try to blast innocent people), but
you also can't get into a protracted standoff with the police. As you do
dirt in a visible manner, such as shooting it out with gangs in the
streets or even getting into a lot of hit-and-run accidents, a meter
starts to slowly fill up. If it gets full, the police show up on the
scene. If they don't see you shooting, you might be able to put away
your gun and sweet-talk the law into leaving. Or, you might just have to
get away. The meter then becomes a timer that slowly drains, and you
absolutely must get away from the police in a fast car. If you don't get
away before time expires, the game lamely proclaims "you are f***ed,"
and shots ring out from nowhere, killing you almost instantly. There
doesn't seem to be any way to fight your way out of this situation. You
truly are "f***ed." It's interesting that someone tried to come up with a
new way to deal with the police in a Grand Theft Auto clone, but this
method isn't any fun at all.
That applies to much of the game, really. Most of the missions aren't
much fun, either, though at least the act of firing a gun is handled
well and surprisingly bloody. Comical, Mortal Kombat-like streams of
blood blast out of just about any person you shoot, especially if you
blow someone's head off. You can lock on and target enemies, and then
use the right analog stick to refine that aim for headshots and so on.
But once you start getting AK-47s and other high-powered weapons,
locking on seems like a waste of time. You can just aim at head height,
hold down the trigger, and sweep across a row of enemies to wipe them
all out immediately. Plus, shooting without locking on is a more
effective way to earn "balls," which is a rage meter. When your balls
gauge is full, you can go into a blind-rage mode that takes the game
first person for a bit. While in rage mode, you autotarget enemies,
which makes them extremely easy to kill. Also, each kill causes you to
regain some of your health, making it a useful feature.
Multiplatform games that appear on both consoles and the PC can be a
real crapshoot, and the PC version is usually the one that ends up
suffering. That's the case with Scarface for the PC, which has the same
menus and controls as the console version. It has been poorly adapted to
work with a mouse and keyboard, and the mouse aiming never feels
smooth. Even more telling is the cheat-code entry screen, which still
requires you to scroll through letters to spell out the cheat, rather
than letting you type it in.
Graphically, the PC version suffers when compared to the Xbox version,
let alone when compared to modern PC games. Even on machines that go way
beyond the game's recommended system requirements, we noticed plenty of
frame-rate trouble and slowdown. The textures aren't pretty, and
overall, the game looks like a quick and dirty console port.
After taking over a couple of neighborhoods, you'll have to visit some of the surrounding islands via boat.
The audio side of the game is all over the place. While the first credit
in the game might say Al Pacino right on the screen, that's just
because the character looks like the original Tony Montana. The final
credit, however, is the credit for the voice actor portraying the lead
character by doing his best Tony Montana impression. He's pretty good,
and just like in the movie, most of his lines are absolutely packed with
cursing. And just as the movie was back when it was new, this may be
one of the most curse-filled games around. The rest of the voice cast is
full of fairly big names that don't necessarily sound like the sort of
names you'd want in a Scarface game, like Bam Margera and Jason Mewes.
For the most part, the voices are fine, though the character Mewes (Jay
of Jay and Silent Bob fame) plays shouts "die, fat a**, die!" at one
point. Who thought working in a fairly obscure Mallrats reference was a
good idea? Tony Montana isn't even fat! The rest of the sound effects
are as you'd expect. There are good gunshot effects, and the car engines
sound decent. The game makes good use of surround-sound setups,
especially on the Xbox. The soundtrack is pretty long and contains songs
from the movie as well as a bunch of newer stuff from acts like LL Cool
J and Cypress Hill, though much of it isn't very effective at setting
the appropriate mood, and at its default setting, the music is usually a
bit too loud, drowning out important sound effects or character speech.
Overall, Scarface: The World Is Yours is more a victim of some poor
design choices than any glaring technical issues. The developers
accomplished the task of bringing Tony Montana back to life. But by
taking the focus off of the gameplay elements that you'd want in an
open-city game and putting it more on the game's bland mission design
and all the dull side tasks you'll have to do to earn a reputation,
Scarface doesn't play to its potential strengths. The end result is a
functional game that presents an interesting premise, but underneath
you'll find a wholly uninteresting game.
System Requirements!
Video Card: ATi 9600,128 Mb
Hard: 2.9 Gb
Ram: 256 Mb
File Size : 571.5 MB
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