50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is a weird game and one very much of its time. You play as 50 Cent alongside one member of G-Unit. After getting stiff on a tour in some nondescript Middle Eastern country 50 decides to take on the local cartel to get back his crystal skull; turns out Curtis is a big Indy fan. That all gets set up in the first minute and pretty much no meaningful story happens from there on. The rest is just 50 and friends killing dudes in an arcade-style fashion, with a combo meter, different points for different types of kills, and money drops in crates.
This is the video game version of those movies where the director self-inserts themselves so they can be a cool guy badass bro, and it is VERY unapologetically 50. The entire 6ish hours of the game has different 50 Cent songs playing constantly, and there is a playlist you can add, remove and reorder songs on but it seemed in my time with the game it played the same three or so songs no matter what I had in my playlist, and none of them were Disco Inferno. While picking up money from crates you can occasionally grab a call at the payphone and buy guns, taunts, and counterkills. Counterkills are pretty much cinematic QTE-lite melee attacks, and as with the songs you can add multiple to a playlist but I did not see more than three different kills. The combat is pretty straightforward, regardless of what weapons you have at the time; they nicely(and brightly) color the enemies in different color shirts and also outline them in red so it is very easy to see where the bad guys are and shoot em dead. This is very much appreciated as the entire game is, as was the theme at the time, very brown so if they had the enemies wearing location-appropriate outfits it would have been a hassle to see anything.
One more thing that was appreciated was actually the AI, your G-Unit pal is very helpful if you happen to be playing solo as they do kill enemies and when things are clear they head right to where you need to go. This gets rid of any worry about getting lost, which to be fair is not that big a worry since the levels are pretty simple, but it is still good to see. The one major downside of the game is the boss fights. Throughout the game you find yourself fighting four different bosses, three of which are just helicopters and one is a pretty standard car chase. This does feel pretty of the time, the 2000s LOVED blowing up helicopters, but the actual action of blowing up the helicopter was not fun. They could have done some cool Krauser-esque boss fights to take advantage of the different counterkills so it just feels like a missed opportunity in an overall solid “B-game”
At the end of the day, I enjoyed my time with 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand and I think most people would as well. It is not the most polished or deep game and it is not very long but it sticks around just about as long as it should and most of my time with the game was a good time despite the lackluster bossfights. And always remember That 50’s a motherfuckin' P-I-M-P
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