Lesson number one: Don't underestimate the other guy's greed!
‘Say hello to mah liddle frien!’… That has to be one of the most recognisable and memorable quotes from Al Pacino’s 1983 classic, ‘Scarface’. Well, it’s only taken 23 years but now we finally get a game based on the film and after sitting through Vivendi’s Scarface: The World Is Yours screening, it looks like it’s been worth the wait.
The game starts at the end of the film with you playing the part of Tony Montana, the Cuban nobody messes with, as he fights Sosa’s cronies in a massive gun battle. In the film, as Tony is in a blind rage and getting peppered with bullets, he is shot from behind and killed.
The game picks up just at the start of this battle and it’s up to you to stop Tony dying and make your escape. If you manage to escape, a crony shows you a secret passage to freedom but gets turned into a human sieve by one of Sosa’s hitmen for his trouble. The whole opening sequence sets the tone for the rest of the Scarface game… it’s violent, vicious, unrelenting and just chock full of swearing… a faithful homage to the film.
Click for larger imageIn fact, even us hardened hacks who loved the film were quite shocked at just how much swearing and violence is in the game. Of course, the film is a brutal and bloody portrayal of organized drug crime and the game looks to recreate the atmosphere of the film as closely as possible. Scarface: The World Is Yours certainly manages that with gusto.
Click for larger imageTo start off, you can target individual body parts on your enemies, choosing perhaps to make them suffer before blowing them away. In the opening sequence we watched as Tony first just targeted a few of Sosa’s henchmen, shooting them down in a hail of bullets. Then one unfortunate soul was targeted and we watched as the crosshair jumped to his arm with was then shot off from the shoulder… before he was finished off with a shot to the head… As his body crumpled to the floor literally spurting blood from shoulder and neck, Tony lorded it up over the carnage, taunting his victims as he killed them.
Now as gruesome as this sounds, there is a point to taking down bad guys as viciously as possible. The more you kill with style and the more you taunt, the higher your reputation goes. A side effect to all this brutality is to build up your ‘blind rage’ meter. Once this is topped up you can go on a sort rampage, very similar to Tony’s climatic last stand at the end of the film, where you become invulnerable and have unlimited ammo, allowing you to waste loads of bad guys in a short space of time.
