Scarface: The World is Yours hands-on

We got our first real crack at the newly redesigned Scarface: The World is Yours back in March, and while it was still in early form - having been recently torn apart and redesigned from scratch - it was already shaping up to be much more than just another Grand Theft Auto clone. Tony Montana looked and sounded slick, the city of Miami was intricately detailed and the cars handled much more smoothly than GTA's bar-of-soap-on-wet-tile rides.

The game looks even more polished since then, and we recently got a better chance to put the game through its paces. We've already covered the basics of being Tony Montana in our earlierpreview, so here we'll focus on what's new.

Our previous hands-on with the game was spent just driving around Miami in cars that handled astonishingly well. This time, we controlled Tony on foot, trying out the easy-to-use aiming controls, his propensity for insults and the fabled Blind Rage mode.

If you've followed the game's development, then you already know it begins with the movie's final scene - the ultraviolent, "say hello to my little friend'" mansion shootout where Tony gets perforated. This is where we started, alternately firing bullets and obscenities at the drug-cartel thugs invading Tony's house. Right off the bat, we altered film history by whirling around to face the assassin who sneaks up and kills Tony in the movie - we used the free-aim targeting to blow his head off.

Mikel Reparaz
After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.