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Dom Robinson reviews
Vivendi Universal Games
Game: 
DVD: 
- Price: £39.99
- Players: 1
- Widescreen: Yes
- Dolby Digital 5.1: Yes
- Xbox Live content: No
- 60 Hz: No
Grand Theft Scarface?
That’s the first thing that sprang to mind when I first saw screenshots for this title and it’llallow fans of the GTA seriesto get straight into it. However, does it reign as supreme as those games?
I have to confess that I’ve never actually got round to watching Scarface, the movie itself,but apart from the apparent fact that some of the dialogue and characters turn up in this video gamespin-off, no previous knowledge is necessary to get into the spirit of it all. In fact, it’s unavoidableto mention the fact I learned when reading up about Scarface: The World Is Yours whichis that Al Pacino’s character, Tony Montano, died at the end of the film and this title plays out a’What if he had survived?’ style of continuation as the cops seize your mansion and you have to escapeback onto the streets and work up your empire from scratch again.
The first thing that happens is the ‘Boot camp’ section which takes you through the basics of how toaim and lock-on to an enemy as well as hiding behind cover and edging along before looking round acorner to cap the bad guys in their respective asses. You’ll also learn that you can shoot the enemiesa limb at a time, and if you catch their head then blood starts to gush a la GTA before they finallycollapse.
You can also taunt them and build up your ‘Balls’-o-meter. When he does this, Tony slows down as heshouts out a succession of profanities since it makes him stagger while saying them. The idea with thisis that it builds up some kind of respect in the game when facing the enemy but as you get into ityou’ll find yourself using it less and less because you just want to get the missions completed. There’salso the option to hold down ‘B’ for Blind Rage mode to sort out the baddies as it sort-of pauses themas the game goes into first-person mode and allows you to blast away ridiculously effectively.
Once this section is complete, you’ll be leading a linear route as you start to regain your empireand build it up again, but after that you’ll be able to select your own missions from what’savailable. To get to this point should take about 90 minutes.
Once you’ve got yourself out of your mansion, you start in Little Havana, doing drug deals and takingover the turf from rival gangs before moving on to other areas and doing more of the same. It may seema bit of a tall order to take on several baddies at once but before you get to the lynchpin they onlytend to come at you 2 or 3 at a time so are quite easily dispatched.
Bear in mind that if you drive like an idiot or shoot people in broad daylight and you’ll attractthe attention of the cops. Get busted by them and you’ll lose all your money and drugs. Therefore, it’swise to make frequent trips to the bank where you can save your game and also deposit money there.
Your aim is to build up businesses and your reputation, the former being achieved by buying property hereand there to act as your ‘fronts’ in different parts of the city. You must do deals successfully andnegotiate bank transfer rates by holding ‘B’ as a red line completes an onscreen circle and then releasethe button. It takes a couple of attempts to get it right, but after that it’ll rarely cause you problems.Also, it might sound a bit odd to describe but you’ll get the idea once you start playing.
About the driving, what I don’t like is that if you don’t escape the cops in a certain amount of time,it simply declares “You Are Fucked” and then bullets rain down out of nowhere either causing yourvehicle to catch fire, or if you then step outside the same bullets will ricochet around your body andkill you. There’s no escape. It was never like this in GTA and it’s not a welcome twist to proceedings.
In fact, cops are after you way too often, just as soon as you step into someone else’s car, for example.You can call your driver over but then a car can quickly get damaged so you may as well nick one ratherthan waste a few bucks getting it repaired after the last altercation.
Also, you can’t jump or vault over walls to escape cops when they’re bearing down on you, and giventhe problems of getting away from them anyway this is a big headache.
One thing I did enjoy is that it’s as much fun riding a bus in this game as it was in any GTA episode.Also, GTA on the Xbox had some serious control issues, mainly because I was so used to playing the gameon the PS2 and the Xbox control doesn’t have two sets of shoulder buttons, but Scarface doesn’t feellike it has any such problems and looks fantastic. There’s no obvious clipping as you drive around andit contains very fluid movement as you walk and run like any GTA fan would expect.
However, in the driving sections I wish I could alter some of the buttons such that accelerate/deceleratewere controlled by the shoulder buttons while driving and not A and X.
It could also do with extra side-look buttons and one for seeing behind you while driving, rather thanit doing the latter automatically only when you reverse as it’s good to keep an eye on cops when they’refollowing you to work out a clever way to ram them off the road.
The music is a great feature of this title with it coming from the likes of Iggy Pop, Georgio Moroderand Blondie plus many more in several playlists that can either be selected one at a time or altogetherand also randomised. Okay, so it seems odd to listen to ’80s music while starting off running round in’70s Cuba but it still sounds cool. Also, the sound FX are extremely loud and proud.
And I know I keep mentioning GTA, but one element where that has set the trend for story-based action gamesis to attract big-name stars and this one has a cast as long as a very long arm. Key names includeJames Woods, Robert Davi, Robert Loggia, Cheech Marin, Jay Mohr, Michael Rapaport, Ice-T, Michael York…,even Ricky Gervais is in there. He wanted to buy some drugs off me but sadly didn’t do the dancefrom The Office 🙂
There is, however, one serious omission. It is NOT Al Pacino doing the voice of Tony Montana, but someguy called André Sogliuzzo, whoseIMDB filmography appears to have himmostly doing video game voiceovers. Nice work if you can get it.
As a brief aside, the CGI cut-scenes do have an option for subtitles, but these often run fasterthan the speech for no apparent reason; it’s amusing when you die that it proclaims, “You fuckedup!”; and you can’t shoot innocent people (Tony growls, “That’s not my style, man.”), butyou can run them over?!
Overall, Scarface: The World Is Yours is great entertainment for a few hours but after thatit starts to get rather repetitive. It’s better thanDriver: Parallel Linesbut still doesn’t hit the mark of the market leader that is the Grand Theft Auto series and if there’sone thing that does make you want to turn this game off it’ll be the endless police hassles wheneveryou’re trying to go about your business.
SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC
GAMEPLAY
ENJOYMENT
OVERALL
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.