Scarface – Money, Power, Respect Review (PSP)

Not what you might expect, but give it a chance.

You’ve released a popular, well made, GTA em up based on one of the all time classic movies, Scarface. The game imaginatively comes up with a sequel storyline for the film and executes it with chainsaw cutting finesse.
Now it comes time for a PSP release. Do you enter the PSP market with a port of the original PS2 game, a market already satisfied with GTA Vice City Stories, or do you decide to release something totally unrelated?
Well if you are Vivendi / Sierra you do the latter. Gone is the gore and fast paced action of The World is Yours. Gone is the chance to see what would have happened to Tony Montana if he had survived the shotgun to the back.

These have been replaced with a turn based strategy game. That’s right, turn based strategy. Now personally I can’t figure out if that is a brave stoke of genius, or a lazy way of not having to squeeze a free roaming Miami into the PSP, but for now I will give them the benefit of doubt.

So let’s start from the beginning. The game has a choice of 2 modes, Movie Scenario and Cartel. Movie Scenario gives you a set of objectives based loosely on scenes from the movie. Each one is introduced with a clip from Scarface (The first one is quite lengthy, it made me question if this was the game or the film it went on for so long!). Once you know what your objectives are you are taken to the real game.

The game takes place on a map of Miami. Red areas show you your territories and the other colours represent those of the other cartels.
The missions are a simple affair. Build and control 5 storage facilities, hire 10 thugs, take every territory. That kind of thing. Each round is made up of several sections. First you need to buy drug making facilities, to produce drugs. Next you need to buy pushers to sell the drugs and thugs to back you up. After that you need to sell the drugs. During this time you can buy special moves. These can be of 3 types. Drug, Law and Combat. Drug allows you to alter the value or production of drugs for the rest of the cartels. Law allows you to buy police and effect other players chances of raids. Combat gives you extra tricks to play during the combat phase of the game, such as Stealth Thugs, that will boost your numbers in a fight, or grenades etc. Finally you can use thugs to attack adjacent territories in a bid to make them your own.

The combat phase takes you to a 3D view of your thugs shooting at the other thugs. This is totally out of your control. However at certain points you are give a chance to use a power move, or hire more thugs or even flee. There is nothing real time about this, it is merely a turn based affair.
Once that is over you go back to the buying phase.

Cartel mode is the same sort of thing, except this time each level has you playing the head of a different cartel. The only real difference here is that if you complete the 3 trials of each cartel you unlock a usable PSP wall paper. Which is a nice touch.

This is not a bad game. I have to admit, even with the ton of reviews stacking up, I did come back to it a couple of times. The trouble is, it is not really what you want for a game based on Scarface.
Even if you ignore that and take it as a pure turn based strategy, it is not really up to the job. The game play is simplistic, with little depth. This does make it accessible. but really the replay value is missing after a while. It is just to samey.

All that said, it is well suited to the PSP in terms of length of game. Each mission will not take you more than about 15 minutes to finish. The video clips are nice, even if the do relate to nothing in game for the most part. Also there is some satisfaction to be had when, in the middle of a whooping in combat, you release a group of stealth thugs and win the fight!