50Cent : Blood on the sand Review

First of all, I am not a fan of rap music; I don't know any of 50Cents songs and know nothing of his history or character. Hopefully the events portrayed in the game are gangster wish fulfilment and not a quiet Sunday for Mr Cent.

The story is painfully thin, 50Cent is doing a gig or tour and is in some way underpaid or double crossed out of money. A man called Anwar who is his contact in this unnamed country offers him a valuable diamond encrusted skull as payment instead of cash. On the way to the airport 50's vehicle is attacked and the skull taken by an unknown female adversary.

On speaking to Anwar a man named Kamal is blamed for the theft of the skull. 50Cent then embarks on an increasingly bloody vendetta against Kamal looking for revenge and his skull back. The trail of the skull twists and turns leading to a shadowy gangster overlord nicknamed the Harvester. Many individuals stick their oar in and get killed for their trouble after double crossing 50Cent. It seems that everyone wants the skull for themselves.

By the halfway point I was screaming at the cut scenes telling 50Cent to just shoot the people he was talking to as surely they were going to double cross him later. They always did, though 50 never listened.

The fragility of the human body is grossly underplayed in this game. For example helicopter fireball crashes are not really survivable; yet two characters come out relatively unscathed.

The background to the game is prostitution, gun running, the drug trade and organ harvesting also rears its head, all really wholesome family value type stuff. Is it possible that a certain section of popular culture operates on the premise that the more vile the better.

I have never bought the ruse of most bands who present an image of hardcore partying and gangster lifestyles. The whole thing just doesn't really gel with the study and work needed to write music and play an instrument. Surely the media can't be being manipulated to suggest that our icons are superhuman machines in whatever field of debauchery they choose.

Rap stars almost always have drugs and criminal convictions in their past. They come from the hood where they started with nothing and now have money and women dripping from them. This is the ultimate cliché action game for the ultimate cliché rapper. Still it's a shooter I like shooters, I don't like rap so what have we got as a pure shooter?

The game does one huge thing right, it allows drop in drop out co-op throughout the campaign. You are asked to choose an a.i. companion if playing alone.

The controls are the default standard for third person shooters in the past three years and work well. The Army of two syndrome is evident in the specially constructed shoehorned in areas for character interaction like boosting each other up to higher areas, pushing heavy doors open etc.

Melee kills are given some importance by the developer, though it was something I hardly used. There is a timing button pushing QuickTime type sequence when one is initiated and you can unlock more graphic and violent killing moves as the game progresses. You unlock weapons and moves with money obtained by shooting crates handily filled with the stuff that litter the areas. On occasion you find a payphone and you use these to have an arms dealer teleport weapons to you.

There are also posters and target collectibles which help the achievements along.

Score multipliers seem fairly useless and I never paid them much attention. If you are interested though it seems that headshots and killing people in quick succession multiply your scoring.

On dying there is a long load before you get back into the action, which though understandable from a technical point of view seems needless sometimes as you die in the same room a few seconds after the last load.

Killing the bad guys fills a meter, when it's full enough you can trigger it by pressing Y, this puts you into bullet time which makes things a lot easier.

For the greater part of the game you are just making your way from point A to point B, usually chasing or looking for a person. In some sections you are looking for certain objects to blow up in the map before being able to progress.

There are tanks that need C4 planting on the side, bits of the buildings sometimes collapse and block your way, occasionally you have to blow things up so that the environment changes for you to progress. One example of this is blowing up a crane so that it drops a pipe, which becomes a bridge for you to cross. It's in these situations that the game tends to mix things up and give you a solution before you have found the problem. For example at one point a mission objective tells you to find an alternative route as the way is blocked by fire, this happens before the explosion sets fire to the environment. While not a huge problem it happened enough for it to be noticeable.

There are several driving sections to break up the shooting, you get to drive and your human or a.i. partner shoots. These are mostly short and fairly banal. At least they aren't frustrating or hard. Best thing you can say about them is they are over quickly and you can get back to the shooting. There is also a helicopter mounted gun section which reminded me of the ones found in the GRAW games. This is fairly well done and cinematic.

I found there to be two main problems with the core shooting game-play. Grenades were present but fairly useless, the animation for throwing took so long and could not be done from cover. This meant that death usually came before 50 threw the grenade from incoming fire. Normally when you are in cover and want to lean out to shoot you move the stick in that direction. Here you have to actively point the camera in the direction you wanted to pop out from behind a pillar. It took a while of sticking my head out on the wrong side before I realised this. Once I knew it was easy enough just an unnecessary addition which felt unintuitive.

At one point I was given a choice of opening a security system, which would make it easier for 50 but harder for partners elsewhere in the game. I chose to make it harder for myself. Pity I never found out what happened if I made the alternate choice. Therein lies the faults with choices in games, non-linearity really means that people don't see the alternate choice.

Character animation is adequate; though I have the feeling these mo-capped files are part of some middleware that every developer who can't make their own buys.

Unreal engine is used here and it's a fairly good example, little texture loading after the game is already in progress and a good polygon count with little slowdown.

The art design can only be described as generic, lifted from a string of similar games,
Levels are the usual streets deserts, theatres. Only one or two areas stand out as being imaginative. A graveyard type area in particular.

There are only about five character models for the enemies, ones in yellow shirts, ones in red shirts, oh and blue shirts too. They carry a specific weapon, like shotguns, rocket launchers, grenades and machine guns. Each enemy type only uses that specific weapon and does not vary at all.
The a.i. is very predictable, they will run to the same spots, never really try and flank you and pop up from cover at set time intervals that could be timed with a stopwatch.

Boss Battles occur in the form of five fights with helicopters. When 50 eventually catches up with the person he is after they take to the air in a helicopter and try and kill him. We have to use rockets to shoot them out of the air. Simple as that, which is fair enough as huge tentacle beasties would be out of place. Also, I hate games that suddenly give normal people the ability to soak up a thousand bullets before dying.

The last encounter takes a lot longer and takes place over three stages with waves of enemies in between. There is also one other encounter with a boss type character who attacks you on foot, gratifyingly he takes the same amount of bullets to kill as everyone else he just attacks you with loads of other enemies in an area with little cover.

Music is of course 50Cent's back catalogue and there seems to be around two CD's worth of his back catalogue here. Any fan will already have these songs I presume but it's a good idea to include a music player. Really you get quite a 50Cent package here; two CD's and some videos are unlocked for in game exploits. Not that I am recommending a string of video games featuring bands, but if this was actually music I liked I would have been really pleased by the package. Sound effects are of a good standard.

I played through once on hard taking around 10 hours and received 610 achievement points. I felt that this was satisfactory.

Checkpoints are as usual satisfactory at the start of the game then become a little too widely spaced later on. The game would have benefited with more checkpoints, the final boss battle being a spectacularly bad example of check pointing.

The only multiplayer is the co-op and this works well with little lag and with another human the game becomes slightly better. The only problem I had was that none of my friends bought the game.

It is probably a different game for a 50Cent fan, I can see how that would make the whole package more attractive. For everyone else it's a generic bland shooter that will occupy 10 hours or so of your life. A reasonably fun third person shooter of the type familiar since Gears of War brought the genre back into fashion. I would recommend a rental here only if you are starved of shooters and really enjoy the genre.

Story 5
Gameplay 7
Graphics 7
Level Design 6
A.i. 5

Total 6.0