In the game industry, you gotta think of the money first.
Tony Montana said in the film this game is based on, "In this country, you gotta make the money first." The developer and publishers took this as, "In the game industry, you gotta think of the money first." It's an awful cash-in title released around the same time as the excellent PS2 game Scarface: The World Is Yours, so that this game could sell a few copies as well.
The game doesn't have a story. You're just Tony Montana, and you own a drug cartel. You sit around, pay henchmen a heap of money to fight other gangs and lose miserably, buy cocaine and then sell it at the same price, and try to take over Miami into the bargain. Gangs have territories they take over, you can shoot other gangs' henchmen to try to take over their territory and you can form alliances with gangs, but the alliance system is broken, as you'll learn in a minute.
So you hire henchmen, send them into another gang's territory, and watch them shoot each other and shout cheesy lines which are almost inaudible because of the awful voice track quality. You'll almost always lose, but scenes taken straight out of the movie still play like the story is advancing. Actually there is no story. You're just supposed to conquer Miami... good luck with that. See, during the Second Crimean War, a perfectly sensible order (ride as fast as you can towards those Russian guns) was ruined by a failure to specify exactly which guns. It's pretty much the same thing here, you're not really told what you're supposed to do and on your own, you can't do much at all.
Now for the broken alliance system. You can form alliances with other gangs so they can help you lose less miserably. When I did though, it was broken and basically existing only by the name; it doesn't function at all. There was a four-way gang battle and after me and my ally had taken the other two gangs out, the guy's henchmen turned on mine, killed them, and then Nacho Contreras said something about f***ing Tony again very soon. Didn't he already with this betrayal? Why, Nacho, why?
The graphics are bland, loads of stuff is recycled, there's almost no music at all, the voice track quality for the henchmen is awful... there's so much stuff I could criticize about Scarface: Money. Power. Respect. The voice acting is good, but lots of voice tracks are recycled from the PS2 game. There are also scenes from the movie included (the movie is brilliant and anyone over 18 should watch it) as a pathetic attempt at making it look like there was a story - there wasn't.
Scarface: The World Is Yours for the PS2 was outstanding and restored my faith in licensed games, only for this game to ruin it again. In closing, I'll say, Tony Montana would swear more than twice the times he did in the entire film and PS2 game put together, if he were ever to play this. So do yourself a favour and avoid this game.