Written By: Alex Shaw

While playing his latest game, in which this dangerous little animal goes to Iraq and massacres every person he meets, I began to despair for all human culture. It’s not that the developers of the game, Swordfish, were just uninspired in placing this rapper du-jour at the heart of a hot-button Middle-Eastern territory and then throwing seven hundred screaming Arabs at him, each with an AK-47, a bandana and a neat line in the most appallingly cliched dialogue, it isn’t even the fact that the game is broken on a fundamental level that only playing on hard mode would uncover, it’s not even that I hate this project, its subject and the way it’s been comported on a base level. No, the reason this makes me crazier than a bastard on Father’s Day is that this game is going to sell bucketloads.

Mainstream journos, when handed this game, will judge it based on the built-in audience of Fiddy fans. This means they won’t look upon it as a real game, but another installment dropped atop his merchandise mountain. Thus it will get away with its multitude of sins. Dedicated gaming press have seen it as a guilty pleasure and a fun arcade romp. I felt no guilt and not the least bit of pleasure playing this, merely a cold deadness where joy once resided and a deep, unremitting fury that this man earns more per year than some of the countries he would gladly visit to perform his bling-fueled genocide. Of course it’s 50 Cent, not Curtis James Jackson III, who’s the neanderthal-browed mass murderer in this game; a sub-human killing machine whose only goal is to get back a skull covered with diamonds. Unfortunately this is apparently the same character he plays every time he sets foot onstage or does an interview for MTV. Unless it’s not, unless it’s him and all this playing characters bullshit is a hangover from childhood games that allows these arrogant, angry halfwits to do and say anything they like as long as there’s some comforting fiction to hide behind.

It’s morally repugnant, needlessly violent, sleazy, mysogynistic and utterly trite… I respect that, but it’s also horribly written and riddled with glitches to the point where it doesn’t feel like a game any more than Paris Hilton’s Stars Are Blind single resembled real music. It’s just a cheap, vanity project for a man with the emotional development of a nine year old. Worst of all, the game’s been applauded for not being quite as bad as the execrable Bulletproof, released on the previous generation of consoles. That it’s not entirely unplayable is not a plaudit and should not enter into the debate on the quality of this game, which is lower than Fiddy’s IQ, thinner than his library and more untraceable than the sum totality of worthwhile actions this man has done with his career.

P.S. Graphics and sound were adequate.

Final Score: 2/10