So far much of this may sound like the Vice City experience, but The World Is Yours does a better job of integrating the gameplay into a more cohesive experience. Everything is driven by your need to rebuild your empire and take down Sosa. There are no random rampages or slaying of pedestrians, hidden packages, or the like. You are focused on making the world yours and as fans of the movie know, Tony never kills anybody that doesn’t have it coming to them.

If you’re a fan of Scarface the movie then you’ll appreciate the way in which the game has captured the character of Tony Montana and the feel of the film. There is a tremendous amount of spoken dialog in the game and although Al Pacino did not lend his voice to the game, the actor voicing Tony did a brilliant job of capturing his voice, accent and all, right down to his inflections. You’d never guess that it wasn’t Al Pacino doing the voice work. This was no small task as you can walk up to just about anyone on the street and begin a conversation with them that will go several lines of dialog deep. In addition to the voice work, the developers also did a good job of capturing the various mannerisms and ticks of Tony Montana, so your character not only sounds like Tony, he acts like him as well. On the downside the overall quality of the graphics is a little on the sub-par side of things. The Xbox version looks significantly better than the PS2 version, more so than can be explained by the Xbox’s slightly higher horsepower.

As you can imagine there is a lot of gunplay involved in building a drug empire, so it’s a good thing that The World is Yours has done an excellent job with the weapons in the game. You can aim your weapon manually with the right stick when you’re in a battle similarly to way you do so in a first person shooter. Since you’re often facing large numbers of attackers this isn’t always a practical way to take out your enemies. Luckily the game also features target locking to help you get a bead on your attackers. When you have an enemy locked you can simply fire away until he (Tony doesn’t kill women, remember) is dead or you can “fine tune” the shot to go for specific areas of the body. So why would you want to aim manually or target specific body parts? Well the game gives you a power-up meter of sorts that it calls the “balls meter”. Killing enemies earns you balls, but you’ll get more balls if you aim your shots well and even more if you kill them without the target lock. You can even earn a few extra balls by taunting your enemies as they die, and Tony was never one to be at a loss for words. Once the balls meter is full you can press a button to send Tony into a blind rage. While raging time slows down, the expletives fly almost as fast as the bullets, and you earn health with each kill you make. Having your balls meter full at the right moment is a big part of the strategy in the game as being able to go into a rage can be the difference between completing a mission with ease or being overwhelmed and killed. This means that the mission difficulty can vary wildly based simply on your balls and you’ll often find yourself delaying a mission until you can build up your meter by killing some local rival gang members or by earning balls by driving dangerously down the streets of Miami.

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