Scarface: The World Is Yours

Game adaptations of films are a funny thing. We all learned long ago, the painful way, to avoid new movie tie-ins (Or is that cash-ins?) like the plague. Older movie adaptations have bucked that trend recently, particularly games of The Godfather and Rocky, by actually being quite good, perhaps because they come closer to being labours of love than the rush jobs of the latest Pixar movie-game.

Where does Scarface fall into this, and how does the port cope with the Wii's controller setup? Scarface: The World Is Yours turns the genre's conventions upside down by using the film as a platform for a stand alone game. It poses the question - what if Tony Montana wasn't shot a billion times at the end of the film, but escaped? Your task here is to rebuild your empire again and take on Sosa (the cockroach), a nice spin on the standard linear level format of movie games interspersed with film clips.

But hang on a second - is this an open ended game where you have to drive around, shooting, dealing drugs and rising to the top and confronting rival gangs? Where could I have played that before? Scarface's major problem is its indebtedness, but also inadequacy next to the Grand Theft Auto series, particularly Vice City, which itself 'pastiched' Scarface and 80's opulence so brilliantly.

Needless to say, missions involve you running errands for people (Dump the crates before the cops arrive, etc); deal drugs and generally break the law in a shooty, fun sort of way. The twist is Tony's ability to blow his lid when he gets really, really mad. Whenever you commit an atrocity - get close enough to someone and you can decapitate them execution style - or drive on the wrong side of the road like the cool kids do. You also get Balls; when your 'Balls-meter' (I coined that one) fills up from all the murdering and taunting, you explode in a Blind Rage, becoming invulnerable and slaying everyone around you in a hail of bullets, a touch that brings it out from GTA's shadow a tad.

All good and well, but the Wii controller doesn't add much to the PS2 experience. The Wiimote aiming system works well when all of your enemies are facing you, but lets you down when you need to turn quickly. Granted; you can turn 180 degrees with the D-Pad, but even this can be tricky in the middle of a fire fight using the B trigger, leaving you longing for the days of two analogue joysticks. And fist fighting is poor: every fight can be won by closing your eyes and waving the remote for thirty seconds.

But the major gripe with the game is true of all platforms: the game is both too difficult and too easy at the same time. A challenge isn't an enjoyable one when it's just killing hordes of enemies with appalling AI. An awful lot of missions revolve around going to a new place and shooting it up, for one reason or another. At one point in each new mission or new territory you take over though, you'll walk into an area filled with enemies and end up riddled with as many bullets as Tony actually did at the end of the film. No problem; you know where they are now, so next time you wait outside the door and pick them off one by one as they run out to get you. The satisfaction of the gun fighting elements drops rapidly once you realise this.

That's not to say the game doesn't have its nice touches. The "exotics" you collect; ludicrous symbols of status and penis size to enhance your reputation on the street are a brilliant addition, as collecting them serves a purpose, unlike in so many other games (Remember the toy capsules in Shen Mue?) . "Do they got tigers?” Montana asks, and do they how if you got the dough. Make no mistake, pet tigers are cool. Damn cool.

And few games have quite as much swearing. Quotable swearing. There's a lot of that. Play it for any length of time and you'll be cursing repeatedly at family members or ordering someone to do the dishes because "the only thing in this world that gives orders is balls." No; swearing isn't cool, what I'm getting at here is that the voice acting and oodles of dialogue are great. There's no Pacino, but a great impression of him, as well as a star studded cast including James Woods (Also in GTA San Andreas, funny that), members of Cypress Hill and even Ricky Gervais.

But what I can't forgive is that the game for the most part looks worse than Vice City, which is more than five years old by my reckoning. Scarface's Miami is smaller, completely flat and the roads curve in straight sections in a way they didn't even in Outrun. Cars, buildings and trees materialise so close in front of Tony that his licence should be revoked and his eyes tested. Wii generation games really ought to be making use of the console's capabilities.

In fact, had Vice City been ported onto the Gamecube, I'd tell you to buy that and play it on your Wii instead. That's not to say Scarface is a bad game; far from it, but the virtual crime world is still very much Rockstar's. Chico.

Writer: Ben Sillis