Review: 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand

50 Cent: Blood on the Sand
Time Investment: 6+ Hours
Verdict: Pass

So you’re a successful, international rap star who doesn’t take s**t. You’re playing the final show on your tour in…an undisclosed, war torn, middle-eastern country (because that’s what you do when you’re doing well)…but afterwards the promoter tells you he doesn’t have the money to pay you. That does not fly! So what do you do in that situation? Naturally you and the other members of your group all immediately put guns in his face and take his diamond encrusted human skull only to engage in a bloody tour through the streets to reclaim it when it is stolen. Nobody crosses you without a fight.

50 Cent: Blood on the Sand knows what it’s about. It’s about screaming to you the virtues of the G-Unit, and it’s also an ok third person, cover-based shooter. What you’re going to get out of this game is largely dependent on not only how much you like 50 Cent’s music (because you will listen to a lot of it), but how much you like believing this narrative that he’s the toughest and most unstoppable force. Even being in the perfect place in that Venn diagram, this game can only skate by on its tone and style for so long before the weaknesses in its mechanics start to chink away at the Kevlar wrapped around the G-Unit.

It is definitely fun to get to an enemy encounter with the hottest club-banger 50 Cent has produced playing as loud as possible and just lay waste to hordes of the latest in topical bad guys. The problem is that, while that can be fun on a theoretical level (which can definitely take you a long way here), it doesn’t totally work on a mechanical one. It is ostensibly a cover-based shooter, but the majority of the time cover is hardly necessary; you can easily run around and kill all the enemies before they can do much damage to you. The latter parts of the game throw enough enemies at you that it becomes more necessary, but it still never feels great. You run up to cover and follow a prompt to slide into cover and then to vault over, but there were a plenty of times where I didn’t quite hit the button to the game’s liking and would just stand in the open, taking fire.

Then there’s the fact that none of the guns feel all that great to shoot. You can buy powerful and varied weapons, but none of them really pack a satisfying punch. That being said, the game’s structure is brilliantly done. The game is absurd and it knows it, so the levels are graded based on scores that you earn from chaining kills together and getting creative in how you dispatch a room full of people. You’ll earn a much higher score if you manage to kill enemies in quick succession and build up a higher and higher combo meter, but you’ll also do better if you manage to get those with headshots or with grenades or as melee executions (for which you can also buy new and more gruesome animations). And most importantly, you get a small bonus on each kill if, after you kill them, you click in the analog stick to do a taunt where Fifty will summarily tell them how much they suck for being murdered by the G-Unit. Like the executions, you can also purchase new and more profane taunts which is much more enjoyable than it has any right to be, and the mediocre gunplay was redeemed a little every time that I used a taunt.

It all works to take the heat off of the story in the game, which…has some flaws. It’s not totally worth getting into why the story in this 50 Cent game is not that great, but some of its flaws are so glaring (or downright offensive) that they are hard to ignore. For starters, and most egregiously from a narrative sense, I’m supposed to think these people are bada**es that should not be messed with, but early in the game there are, not one, but two characters who take the time to tell Fifty he should, under no circumstances, trust any person he meets in this city. He then proceeds to implicitly trust every single person he meets, and—without spoiling it—is double-crossed by all of them. Worse still, though, is that one of those characters he foolishly trusts is the woman who steals his diamond skull at the beginning of the game. For reasons that barely matter, they are teamed up for some time and, unless I missed it, she (the only woman in the game that isn’t a stripper) is not given a name and is instead exclusively referred to as “b***h.” It’s unfortunate the first couple of times and then begins to become truly and bitterly terrible by the end when she becomes a larger and larger part of the plot and is still never even worth a name.

It’s tough to come back from that one, and the game does certainly have a lot working in its favor. The score-based combat system is fun and turns a lackluster game into something pretty fun to play. It’s good at always keeping you moving with color-coded ammo boxes that correspond to your four weapon types, which is a good arcade-style way to deal with ammo for all the different guns you’re carrying at once. The soundtrack is fully customizable and unlocks more and more songs as you play further into the game, so if you want to only listen to couple of the songs, all of them, or none of them, you are welcome to. It will mix up the shooting levels with levels in an armored Humvee or attack helicopter. Lance Reddick makes a brief appearance (although he sounds like he doesn’t totally know he’s even being recorded). It’s a shame because the game is often times quite fun; it simply is too sloppily put together and takes maybe a few too many liberties with its treatment of its female characters to justify seeing this game through.