Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

100 or More Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Amazing"

Older gamers might remember a movie called Scarface, released in 1983. One of the most controversial and memorable films in those days, it featured the rags-to-riches Tony Montana. To spoil the movie 29 years later, it ended with Tony dying and falling in a fountain in front of a statue saying, 'The World Is Yours.' In the video game, though, which starts from the movie's final scene, Tony is wounded and manages to escape. He loses everything and then swears to drop his drug addiction and take everything back. While people who liked the movie might be a little disappointed that the epic ending of the movie was changed, it's a great plot as a quasi-sequel.

The developers have perfectly recreated the setting of the game, and the amount of detail in it is astonishing. Tony can hold long conversations with pedestrians, for example. If the player holds the L1 and R1 buttons while on the dance floor in a club, Tony will start dancing. The game also has some of the most iconic scenes from the movie: the memorable 'say hello to my little friend' scene and the chainsaw scene.

It looks and plays like a Grand Theft Auto clone, but in reality there's even more stuff to do in Scarface than in GTA. You can use the bank for laundering money, sell drugs, renovate your mansion once you've taken it back, etc. This game also has vehicular combat which is extremely enjoyable. There is a Balls meter that rises as Tony taunts enemies or holds conversations with pedestrians. Once it is full, you can activate Rage mode which changes the game to first person perspective, makes you invincible, auto-targets enemies to make them easier to kill, and gives you back some health for enemies you kill. You can call your henchmen to deliver vehicles to you, and police chases have a heat meter which rises if you can't get away and once it is full, it's game over (the game helpfully says that 'you are f***ed').

In interactions with police, drug dealers or people who launder money, a minigame activates in which there are two or three zones: black-and-yellow for failure, dark grey for partial success, and grey for success. In the first zone Tony will fail completely - the bankers may refuse to launder his money for example. In the second, he will only be partially successful - selling his drugs at a loss for example. In the third, he will be successful - for example he may talk the police into letting him go.

There are takedown-style moves you can use on enemies when up close, and these are as over-the-top as the movie was 29 years ago. You can use the right analog stick to aim for headshots (or, in this game, groin-shots even). The vehicular controls take some getting used to because Circle is for handbrake instead of R1, but once you do vehicular combat is extremely fun. The radio has plenty of good songs as well, and you can turn it on anywhere, even if you're not in a car.

Overall, Scarface is one of the best open-world games around. While the movie is fine ending as it ends, the developers did a great job of making a quasi-sequel game for a movie that was not supposed to have a sequel. It has several unique ideas and if you can bear to hear the F-word every ten seconds there's a lot of fun to be had here.