| Date Posted: | Monday 14th May, 2007 | Author: | Alfreido | |
| Subject: | Game Review | Views: | 2329 | |
| Comments: | 5 Make a comment |
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Scarface: The World is Yours Review Written by Ben Thomson (Alfreido) I would bet a rather large sum of money that no one has picked up a toy gun before without uttering the phrase, "Say hello to my little friend!". Probably one of the most recognizable lines in the history of movies, the honour of being the one who brought this line to the masses was none other than Tony Montana (played by Al Pacino) in one of the best crime movies of our time, Scarface. The movie featured Tony Montana as a drug-lord who had it all... mansion, weapons and a mountain of cash which would make Scrooge McDuck jealous. And then, in one of the most memorable shoot-outs in history, he lost it all by being shot in his mansion by a large gang raid and falling into his fountain from the top of his stairs. You must be asking yourself, how can they make a game out of someone you know clearly dies? Well, in actual fact, the game actually follows a storyline of the "What if...?" type. What if Tony Montana actually survived the large gun battle and fought his way out of the mansion, losing it and all his possessions but living to fight another day? That's what Scarface: The World is Yours lets you answer. See, kids, you're rewriting 'history' here! The game takes wing of the winning gameplay which made the Grand Theft Auto series so popular, and opens up a whole city for you to run amok, sell drugs, make enemies and generally bring back the empire which you lost. You are assigned jobs by your friend, Felix, and from doing jobs, you not only earn cash but find out contacts and dealers, which allows you to buy drugs and re-sell at large prices and earn even more money. With the money, you can buy henchmen, vehicles and other tidbits which raise your reputation. You can even buy fronts for your drug ring which allows you to easily dish out drugs and rake in the profits. Not only do you have to make your drug ring bigger though, you have to also muscle out the gangs which have parked themselves all over your former territory. To do this, you must get yourself a large gun, and walk up to the gangs and blow them away. Sounds easy? Not really. They usually outnumber you 50 to 1, but you get a special trait: Blind Rage. You can taunt the dead bodies of your enemies to raise up your 'balls meter', which when full, allows you to go into Blind Rage. In Blind Rage, the viewpoint goes to a first person view, you are invincible, your aim is deadly and you earn health for everyone you kill. You can easily wipe out a whole gang in Blind Rage mode. The storyline of the game is very standard. You just earn money to build up your empire and return yourself to former glory. There is not much in the way of story in this game, instead opting to let you live the life of Tony Montana your way. Some missions do push the storyline forward, but they are few and far between. Most of the missions include taking out a group of people, making drops for people (usually drug-related), guarding particular people and taking out more people. Not a lot of variety in the missions but it is somewhat offset by the feeling of earning more money and putting it to good use. You do notice differences when you start taking over turf. At the start of the game, you can pretty much walk nowhere without being beaten down by some very nasty mob of gangster. After a couple of hours of play, you'll start to be approached more cautiously, and finally, you'll be able to traverse the whole town without breaking a sweat. Even the cops featured in the game will be nothing to you. The gameplay, however, just isn't varied enough. You earn money, you sell drugs and you buy exotics. Rinse and repeat. It is very similar to Grand Theft Auto but Grand Theft Auto at least had some variety in the missions. On the next page, we break the game down into the technical parts and find out how well it performs in each area... Graphics If you got this game with the thought that it was released a couple of years after Grand Theft Auto 3 and must look a lot better, I bet you're feeling rather disappointed now. The game features an engine just like Grand Theft Auto 3's engine (in fact, if Tony Montana weren't in it, this would probably be the closest thing to a Grand Theft Auto sequel) in that a whole world is open to you. You have cars, you have pedestrians, you have a lot of buildings and you have a lot of ground to cover if you wish to travel from one side of the city to the other. Just like Grand Theft Auto 3, the distance and size of the playing field is superb, giving you a heap of area to run amok in. However, for a game which was released close to 3 years after Grand Theft Auto 3, it hasn't got a really noticeable graphical advantage over its cousin. In fact, in some ways it has gone backwards. The game was designed for the consoles first, and PC second, so once again, PC games get the short end of the stick, but come on Vivendi, what was your graphics department up to when creating this game? Too much time spent on Nude Twister, not enough on the game. What are my gripes, you ask? Well first off, the view distance of the game is horrid. After seeing games like Oblivion, Stalker, Gothic 3 etc. where you can see honestly kilometres into the horizon, Scarface is content with letting you see up to the end of the street and no more. Now this may not matter too much because you are focussed on what is directly next to you, I can't see any reason why you shouldn't have a large view to have a spiel at once in a while. Honestly, our computers can handle it these days Vivendi, you didn't have to design the game cautiously. Also, the textures in the game are rather poor and blocky, and some things don't even have textures at all. Some buildings don't have any textures at all, instead they are just a single colour. Grass and road textures are very low resolution and blood splatters are simply horrid. The models in the game are a little bit more detailed, but even then, we've seen much better graphics in other games, and to go backwards for a game like this, it just doesn't make you a happy camper. In fact, the only impressive model is of Tony Montana himself. It looks just like Al Pacino (who gave his likeness to the character, but not his voice) and is easily the most impressive looking model in the game, the rest are pretty standard and are lacking finesse. The vehicles in the game all look well designed, but once again, don't have the eye candy that other games have. They don't have reflections, they don't have the chrome look that some games have (like Need for Speed: Carbon) and they simply look like very decent models covered in average textures. I can't recommend the graphics in this game at all, they just didn't put enough time into it. Sound Another section of the game which needed a bit more loving, however, I must say that it is a little bit better than the graphics. The soundtrack almost sounds like a complete lift from Grand Theft Auto 3. It features some of the songs that featured in Grand Theft Auto 3, including "She's on Fire", one of my least favourite songs from that game. There are a lot of tracks present in the game, even by some respectable artists such as Johnny Cash, but a lot of it is rap and crap like Run DMC and Suicidal Tendencies. There is an extreme amount of profanity in the game. Nearly every sentence in the game has a swear word in it, most of all by Tony Montana himself. Speaking of Tony Montana, he has a voice actor providing his voice this time around (personally chosen by Al Pacino however), so those of you wanting to hear Pacino will be sadly disappointed in this game. The voice actor that has replaced Pacino however sounds really close to Pacino, and I was actually fooled for a while before I listened carefully, so Vivendi have done a good job hiring someone who sounds just like the actor, instead of just grabbing any old person to replace an actor. The engine sounds in the game are fairly standard, nothing to write home about. They are good for their purpose, but some of them don't have the 'oomph' that will blow your subwoofer apart if turned up. A little more grunt in some of the faster and more powerful cars wouldn't have gone astray. There is surround sound featured in the game, but there are little sound options provided in the game, only volume controls. You can't disable EAX or reverb (mind you, they don't sound like they are in the game anyways). Lastability The game starts off fairly slowly but does manage to pick up very shortly after starting. The game manages to grab you at the start but afterwards, just flutters away with the lack of different missions and lack of storyline. The game will probably take around 20-30 hours to complete and get everything, but whether or not it holds your interest for that long is another question. Final Thoughts As I said before, games made from movies have a stigma of being bad, the only notable exceptions include Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, the Lord of the Rings games and the almighty Goldeneye 64. Unofrtunately, Scarface: The World is Yours just doesn't seem to quite break away from that stigma. It features some really cool features and does carry on the Scarface name with pride, but as a game it just doesn't hold interest for too long, and wasn't designed with a lot of care due to it being a console game originally. It could've been so much more. |
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Comments
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Ej Gamestah General Manager 291 comments |
im playing this atm, like it alot, so close to the movie in feel. | |
| Posted at Monday 14th May, 2007 - 6:46:13 pm | ||
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Sacrifice Esports Commentator 15 comments |
missions are too 'samey', speak engrish? | |
| Posted at Monday 14th May, 2007 - 8:45:08 pm | ||
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Alfreido Gamestah Website Admin 84 comments |
It's a word.... now. | |
| Posted at Monday 14th May, 2007 - 8:55:00 pm | ||
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Kommandant 30 comments |
is this out for 360? I'd rather play it on 360 then PC as i've got large gohonas | |
| Posted at Tuesday 15th May, 2007 - 5:32:20 pm | ||
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Mr_Zain 3 comments |
I have one more gripe with this game. You can't just go and attract police attention by blasting random civilians in the face. When I got to the end of the drug haul I wanted to execute some mayhem all over the city and alas could not *tear* | |
| Posted at Thursday 25th June, 2009 - 5:36:56 pm | ||
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Rated by 3 members.
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