Imagine the scene: 50 Cent has just finished playing a sell-out concert and is ready to collect his fee. There’s one problem: the venue owner who put on the gig doesn’t have any money, and offers to pay an angry 50 with a crystal skull. A real person’s skull encrusted with thousands of dollars worth of crystals. Nice. 50 and G Unit naturally accept and leave the venue with the skull.
The crew are ambushed and the skull stolen – and 50 Cent and G Unit now embark on a classically violent quest to get back the skull. It’s silly, ridiculous, violent and unrealistic – but it’s so over the top that it makes you laugh, and the game knows that it’s cheesy and improbable, and often plays to that fact for laughs.
50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is a typical Unreal Engine shooter of this generation, featuring everything you’ve come to expect. You’ve got third person shooting and covering systems ripped straight out of Gears of War, an Economy System and Co-Operative mode aping Army of Two and a scoring system throughout every level reminiscent of The Club.
Even the now commonplace QTEs make an appearance, this time as “Brawler” moves – brutal finishing moves you can execute hand-to-hand if you get in close enough. How you fight will earn you more points, too – working with your partner better, racking up kills in a row, or crippling someone by capping them in the leg and moving in for a brawler kill will all add to your score total and propel you up the online leaderboards.
You’ll be tasked with rampaging through several levels as 50 Cent with an option for a partner to join you online as a member of G Unit to wreak double the havoc. There’s 20 various weapons to purchase and use and the vast majority are satisfying to use and different enough from one another to make your weapons load out an important choice in how you play.
50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is very much a by-numbers shooter, quite deliberately simplistic and hedonistic in nature. In the age of Halos, Call of Duties and Killzones 50 Cent could perhaps be construed as something negative, but I don’t believe so. For me, 50 Cent was a breath of fresh air, a welcome change in a sea of complex and plot-heavy next-gen games..
While the game has its problems, notably suffering from the graphical flaws that many Unreal Engine games do, the game is surprisingly solid and simple, old-school action that doesn’t require much commitment of time or brainpower to play. Like Dynasty Warriors, it is a great game to slam on when you’re bored but want to kill some time without concentrating too hard.
The ridiculous 80’s action movie plot and over the top arcade action will wash over you and numb your brain and you’ll quickly find yourself an addict, using the ‘cuss button’ (yes, there’s a cuss button) after each kill to earn yourself extra points and that gold medal for each level.
Fans of 50 will also find over 40 tracks by the rapper on the disc, as well as 18 exclusive new tracks – in many ways for his fans, this is a game and an album all in one. The game provides a music player to listen to the tracks outside of gameplay. The music does become slightly repetitive, but at no point is it out of place, fitting in with the high-action, high-swearing tone of the game quite, quite well.
Graphically the game suffers from classic Unreal Engine flaws as mentioned earlier but is on the whole quite easy on the eyes with decent looking character models, nice environments and good-looking effects.
The game doesn’t do anything new, can look rough in places, and has a ridiculous plot, questionable voice acting and a sad lack of local split-screen co-op. It’s also hedonistic and obnoxious. It also knows it and is and as such has fun with it. And boy, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is a hell of a lot of fun.
If you can look past the silly plot and ridiculous premise, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is some classic, amazing arcade-style fun. Nowhere near perfect – but a hell of a lot of fun.
