50 Cent: Bulletproof

Dec 6, 2005

Must be great to be an artist for whom cashing in is just part of the M.O. Take 50 Cent, who's already followed up a couple platinum records with clothes, licensed bling, and a lousy movie. Now a truly bad game follows in the movie's footsteps. With a few improvements, Bulletproof would be no-frills action, but as released by Vivendi it's just poor.

The last time we saw a musician starring in his own game it was Michael Jackson in Moonwalker. That was 15 innocent years ago; Curtis Jackson's game is a far cry from an adventure where Jacko danced enemies into submission.

Bulletproof is a violent hip-hop fantasy come to life. Fittingly, it's got a mess of music video flash editing instead of a plot and shell casings where the brain should be. And a soul? Forget about it. The game's vision of 50, endorsed by the man himself, makes a lie out of any claim that his music is street poetry. There's no metaphor here. 50 Cent has been plugged, his crew has been wronged, and the only way to make things right is to blow the hell out of everyone.

Never mind the cultural theory; we'll let someone else debate what Bulletproof means to hip-hop. It's easy enough to dismiss it as a game. The only thing to do here is shoot people, and there's no way to do it well. Bulletproof forgoes any sort of targeting system, instead behaving like an FPS with a third-person camera. It's easy enough to point the lens at the sky or ground, and to spin around in circles, but not at people. We fiddled with settings, inverting each axis and adding the aim enhancement, and it was still impossible to hit anything.

It's much easier to let the game shoot everyone, then simply run through the doorway leading to the next area. 50's G-Unit crew has got his back; they'll take out most of any level's population, and they never seem to die. (Fifty, ironically, isn't bullet proof -- he'll go down like a paid fighter after a couple shots.) It doesn't make any sense that the A.I. is good enough to hit every target while we linger in the background, but that's the game in a nutshell.

When you're sick of missing with two out of three shots, it might be time to let the countermove system go to work. Just like in Dead To Rights, 50 can walk right up to a sucka, tear his weapon away, and put the guy down with a broken neck or a knife to the face. That's empowerment!

Also as in Dead to Rights (and a dozen other games) rappin' Jackson can take cover behind corners and crates, and even carry some forms of cover around as a mobile shield. But the interaction system is as bad as the camera and targeting, so it's more frustrating than anything else. There's nothing like getting capped while trying to flatten 50 against a wall.

When the camera can be made to point at any of the humans, you'll see that the character models are excellent. The screenshots didn't lie -- the G-Unit crew looks sharp, and 50 is a marvel of smooth textures and solid animation. It's good to be the king.

It must have been lousy to be the level designers, though, since the rest of Bulletproof is murky, dark, and drab. It's no surprise that the game mostly takes place in corridors, homogenous rooms, and back alleys, but how about a little more effort to use interesting lighting and texture design?

Since the primary characters look so good, it's no surprise that they're voiced pretty well. Given that Pinocchio is less wooden than Fitty's performance in his own movie, you've gotta wonder how much of this is actually him. Not that it matters. Listening to the dialogue is perhaps the least painful part of the game.

Instead of decent gameplay, there are loads of unlockable videos and several discs worth of 50 Cent's music. The fact that anyone interested enough in Fitty to unlock the extras has probably already seen them apparently escaped Vivendi. Then we realized that this isn't a game, but a marketing tool, and so it makes perfect sense that the gameplay is little more than a commercial for the real product. Look out for the inevitable Xbox 360 sequel, in which we'll probably be able to buy actual swag from within the game.

You want 50's music? Buy a CD. Grab a DVD if you want to see the guy move. But if you want to pretend to be Curtis Jackson, take your fifty bucks out to a paintball range and let someone drill you nine times. It'll be a better experience than this.