This game is good fan service, but a terrible port. Major control problems eventually drown out everything else.
If you’re a huge fan of the movie like I am, then you don’t want one of your favorite movies to be soiled for a quick buck. To it’s credit, Scarface avoids doing this. The way that the end of the movie is rewritten isn’t all that bad, as long as you don’t take it too seriously. It picks up with you at the top of the stairs just outside your office with an assault rifle/grenade launcher combo in your hands. Instead of getting shot in the back by the guy with sunglasses and a shotgun, you can turn around and fill the guy full of lead. This little detail is one of the many ways that the game repeatedly pays homage to the movie. Therein lies the biggest strength of the game. It has Sheffield, Nacho Contreras, Caspar Gomez, and other relatively obscure characters and details from the movie that hardcore fans will recognize immediately. You may find some of it to be overkill though. Some of Tony Montana’s lines seem forced, as if the writers were bending over backwards to make sure that every famous line from the movie got squeezed into the game. The voice actor who does Tony Montana sounds perfect, even though the quality of the writing is so-so.
Scarface won’t be winning any awards for graphics. Even for a port of a PS2 game, Scarface looks downright ugly. Environments are mostly bare, with low-detail, ugly textures and characters are blocky and hideous. The development team apparently spent a lot of time modeling Al Pacino’s face and his mannerisms, but that’s the only good part about the visuals. This is a game that would have been at home back in 2002 on the PC, but nowadays, it’s badly outdated. REALLY badly outdated. If you can get past the ugly graphics, the controls will likely sink you. Scarface takes laziness and incompetence in game porting to new levels. The mouse look function, a basic feature that should always work, is extremely clunky and practically broken. Aiming is much harder than it should be, so much that you’ll be relying in the lame auto-aim/lockon feature that is a relic from the game’s console origins. The default keyboard configuration requires two hands on the keyboard to use all the commands. Here’s the best part – you can’t change any configurations! The game has an options menu that was apparently made for reconfiguring your keyboard, but it doesn’t do anything. You’re stuck using the game’s dimwitted default control scheme.
It gets even better though. Not only can you change keyboard bindings, but you also can’t use a gamepad at all! Gamepad configuration also shows up in the Options menu, but it also does nothing, and that means that you’re stuck using the keyboard for the game’s numerous driving sequences. A keyboard just doesn’t work very well for driving, and that makes the game frustrating. If you bought a gamepad for games like this, then you’ll be disappointed that you can’t use it. Radical games and Vivendi apparently put no effort or thought into this port. At every turn, you’re fighting the controls, and eventually it just gets too frustrating to deal with. If the game is native to a gamepad, the least that they could do is let you use one!
Scarface sports a very impressive list of voice actors and they give a very good performance. There’s also a nice selection of 80’s music, but wasn’t there a game that already offered free-form driving and gaudy ‘80’s style? Oh yeah, it was Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a game that is superior in every single way to Scarface: The World is Yours. If you haven’t played that game, go dig it out of the bargain bin and if you have played it, play it again.
I can’t recommend this game, even to hardcore fans of Scarface. It’s Grand Theft Auto in Miami, but that game was done over three years ago and done a lot better. Ugly graphics and terrible controls drain any entertainment value that this game could have had. It’s too bad, because the game had potential.