Scarface: The World is Yours

Tony Montana's rise from an imprisoned immigrant to a drug lord living a luxurious lifestyle has made him an American icon. Of course, his story also ends with a climactic death as famous as Montana himself. "Say hello to my little friend!" he shouts, armed with an M203 grenade launcher and an M16 assault rifle, before blasting his way out of his mansion that has been recently invaded by a SWAT team and assassins from a rival drug lord. This is where Scarface: The World is Yours picks up, which gives players a chance to re-enact the scene. The mansion shootout is faithfully recreated, but the developers at Radical Entertainment made a rather significant change: Tony Montana lives.

The game's premise is ballsy (to use Tony's words), but since Radical is dealing with a property as revered as Scarface, some fans might find it heresy and never be able to appreciate this game. For those who can get used to the idea of controlling a Tony Montana who not only survives impossible odds in the mansion, but inexplicably kicks his addiction in the aftermath, a sandbox-style game set in a sprawling and densely populated Miami awaits.

He needs no introduction.

Tony is controlled using the Nunchuk's control stick. The Wii Remote aims his weapon and controls the camera. When players begin the game for the first time they are given the chance to try out four different cameras, each with varying speeds and targeting areas. Point outside the targeting area, and the camera begins to rotate around Tony. All four cameras take some practice. Players will spend the first few missions struggling to re-orient the camera while still trying to aim at their foes, especially while moving.

Targeting foes is much more precise than camera control. Players can push the Z button to lock on to the nearest foe, or simply move the Wii Remote to use free aim. Free aim feels spot-on and intuitive, which makes location-specific damage easy to perform. The location-specific damage is acknowledged on the screen, so if you shoot a guy in the kidney, you'll see "kidney" flash on the screen. If you shoot a guy in the head, you'll see "head." The game even has separate listings for successful shots to the "left nut" and "right nut," each of which are different than shots to the groin area as a whole.

Shooting with the Wii Remote is fun. Controlling the camera with the Wii Remote is not.

The location-specific damage is recorded in loving detail, but it has little effect on the gameplay. If you manage to score a headshot, the victim will rightfully drop, but there seems to be no functional difference between hits to other regions of the body. Shooting a guy in the leg will cause his leg to buckle and the enemy to stall momentarily, but he will be up and running at full speed again in under a second. Similarly, a shot to the arm will cause the enemy to clutch his arm and stall for a second, but after that he'll be firing like nothing happened. The damage model in Scarface: The World is Yours seems underdeveloped when compared to The Godfather: Blackhand Edition, or Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition, where a shot to the leg or arm could noticeably and permanently affect the way enemies respond.

The skimpy damage model renders the game's initial gun fights nearly identical. Enemies are aggressive and come at Tony in large groups, but the absence of any reward for well-placed shots left me content to simply spray bullets indiscriminately at anything that moved. In fact, the game automatically prevents Tony from shooting innocent bystanders because he "never f----- anyone that didn't have it coming." The game attempts to reward players for skilled shooting by raising Tony's "balls meter" for location-specific damage, but in practice players can make up any lost points for indiscriminate shooting by simply shaking the Nunchuk (or hitting the A button) to hear Tony Montana taunt an enemy.

The game's manual suggests that "no one can flip out like Tony can," and while that may be true, players are probably going to get really annoyed, really fast, with the lack of variety in Tony's taunts. The core mechanic that sets Scarface: The World is Yours apart from other action games is the aforementioned "balls meter." As players dispatch their enemies, make risky driving maneuvers, taunt enemies, and do other things befitting of Tony Montana, they gain points for their "balls meter." When the "balls meter" reaches 1,000 points, players can shake the Nunchuk to enter a first-person perspective where the entire screen goes red in order to signify Tony's "blind rage." Enemies killed in the first-person "blind rage" mode restore Tony's health, which makes filling the "balls meter" essential to Tony's survival. As a result, players will constantly be shaking the Nunchuk to taunt fallen enemies, in an effort to gain the scant +50 balls bonus provided by taunts.

Action Hero Rule #1: Always follow explosions with ridiculous quips.

The taunts are funny, but there are only so many 'F-bombs' one can hear before it gets old. Sadly, the same can be said for all of the game's dialogue to this point. Andre Sogliuzzo does an admirably authentic Tony Montana impersonation, and encounters with other celebrity voices have been funny thus far, but this game's script contains so much profanity that it feels like it was written by an immature twelve-year-old. One time while escaping from the police, an officer on a bull horn warned me "Don't you f------ move!" and, when I jacked a car and ran through a barricade a mere second later, the dispatcher on the police scanner sighed, "Could someone please stop this a--hole?" Tony Montana never had the most civilized mouth, and his liberal cursing should lend to the authenticity of the game, but the profanity is so prevalent that it devolves into caricature.

My annoyance at the swearing cops turned into full-on disappointment when I sped away. Despite the large and lively city of Miami that players are presented with, driving around it hasn't proven to be very fun. The cars feel like they have no weight to them, almost as if Tony is driving hovercrafts. The differences between various cars have thus far proven to be negligible, and all of them possess unrealistic acceleration and an extremely floaty feel.

In addition to outrunning cops and taking lethal revenge on those who toppled his empire, Tony will buy and sell cocaine, launder dirty money, and use it to purchase various businesses as fronts. These actions are controlled by a simple mini-game that sees Tony talk to the dealer, buyer, banker, or business owner and press the A button. A meter is displayed on the screen, and players will hit the A button again to start it, and stop it by letting go which makes the meter similar the same one used to handle kicking in football games or putting in golfing games before the advent of analog control. Despite the cheesy dramatic heartbeat that plays when one of these sequences is initiated, they are far from suspenseful because the simplicity of the meter allows players to easily achieve the best results.

The chainsaw is cool, but the car isn't.

Scarface: The World is Yours makes a conflicting first impression. On one hand, the precision aiming and enemy AI make for fun firefights. On the other, they tend to get repetitive due to their "Shoot. Taunt. Repeat. Rage!" nature. The game's presentation is undeniably authentic, but it comes on way too strong. The graphics are thus far passable, but the load times are annoying. The drug dealing and money laundering mini-games feel tacked on, but could be fun diversions. Melee combat is barely worth mentioning (players simply hold a button and wiggle the Wii Remote, with Tony throwing arbitrary punches), but the motion-controlled combat shows more promise when Tony wields a chainsaw.

Stay tuned for Stage 2 where I will examine the game's extensive customization options, the operation of businesses, and find out how the presentation, storyline, and control pan out when the game really starts to open up.