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50 Cent Blood on the Sand Review

Posted on 20. Apr, 2009 by Freak_c in News, Reviews

I know what you are thinking, A game made around a hip hop rapper is going to be terrible right? What would it based on? Is this just some type of publicity for 50 Cent? Is he that vain? Well the answer to a few of those questions are yes, is the game terrible surprisingly no. Not only was it not terrible, it was a gang busting heap of fun.

The Game
Theres not going to be a heart moving, emotional story from a 50 Cent game. Basically the game starts as 50 Cent finishes a concert in the middle east and when he goes to get his payment from a crooked overlord, he surprise surprise doesn’t have the money fiddy learns about a skull encrusted with diamonds and then goes a rampage in this make believe country to get it. With the aid of some G-unit buddies fiddy takes on helicopters, hawds of terrorist army men. Ridiculous right, but it’s fun, a lot of fun.

So yes 50 Cent thinks he is the shizz nizz and can create more damage on his own than Team America could ever hope and in this game it’s pretty easy to do. Fiddy can carry 4 types of weapons at anytime and they can be swapped with other weapons of similar type. These are assigned to the D-pad, up is your pistol type guns, left are your automatic types guns such as an uzi, right are your LMG guns, and down are your explosive guns rocket launchers etc. You are able to swap between them at anytime during the game. You can upgrade them with the money you get from the kills you get and from stealing / collecting loot around the stages. The more you kills, the more points and money you get which increase with a kill multiplier, so the game encouranges you to try and kill as many enemies in a row to keep your score up. If you get a kill frenzy you are awarded some limited but interesting ammo for you pistol. These include fire rounds or explosive rounds.

The game is fast paced as every now and then you are given tasks to complete, like kill 3 grenadiers before the time runs out, which of course add to your points if completed, which adds to the excitement. There are take downs that 50 can perform on villains for close quarters action which are down a quick time button game, but the problem is it is always the same button. Which gets repetitive fairly quickly, this is true for a bunch of things in the game.

Fiddy goes to war backed by one of the three G-Unit members: Lloyd Banks, Tony Yayo or DJ Whoo Kid. The choice you make doesn’t affect gameplay, as all three are of equal skill, which isn’t much as they basically yell some hints to you and run to the end of the stage, showing you to the next area. The only other use for his side kicks are if you play an online co-op game, the second player can choose one of the 3 and help you on your quest. There is no online multiplayer though which is a little up setting as I think it would’ve been a blast.

The game is pretty easy and I clocked it on the normal difficulty in just under 8-9 hours, a decent time length for the game. It’s also easy as the game will tell you what buttons to push pretty much throughout the entire game. The AI is no Killzone AI and are easy to deal with. There are some downfalls of course; it is a very linear game and the path is laid out to you literally, which is frustrating because if you want to go back you won’t be able to run over a few stones you will have to go around. This get irritating as there are five posters and five target in each level for you to find. But none of this is really bad enough to pull the game down and the fun factor makes up for it. And it is simple plain fun.

I must mention the swearing in the game, it doesn’t bother me at all and made me laugh a bit. Some of the taunts are quite interesting and straight to the point. You can taunt the baddies while you’re killing them for more points and you are even able to upgrade your taunts, which vary with the amount of profanity. I think the fist words of the game were Fuck you bitch, wheres my money? So you may want to play this late at night if you have younglings around.

Graphics and Sound
The game is built with the Unreal engine and looks pretty decent, not the best but not the worst. Not much to say about the graphics, just that they look good and are acceptable by todays current gen console requirements. 50 Cent and the G-unit crew are rendered great, explosions and background environments are excellent. Some of the animations though are lacking. Sound is fair explosions and guns sound as they should, not much use of the surround speakers though. The music is a nice collection of 50 cents tracks from his various albums and he even wrote a few just for the game. There is a juke box that you can choose which tracks to listen to and what order. Only problem i came across was when watching the unlockable music videos the sound came only from the surround speakers which was strange. Most of the songs will have you head popping about.

Conclusion
Well my first thoughts of the game before I even put it in was this is going to blow and I won’t even play it longer than 20 minutes. Boy did it slap me in the face. I didn’t put the controller down for the first half of the game. Within the first level you are already just playing and having a huge amount of fun. With a few upsets and draw backs you can’t get over how much fun the game is. Would I buy it? No I would rather buy it second hand or trade it, unless you are a 50 Cent fan. This game is the shizz nizz for pure mother fucking fun yo!

The game – 7
Graphics – 7
Sound – 6

Over all – 7/10 Enjoyable fun!

by Claudio Cecchi (Freak_c)

A big thank you to Ster-Kinekor for supplying the game.

Tags: 50 cent, blood on the sand, Reviews