Blood On My Hands

Don’t you hate those people who say “to cut a long story short” and then cut to some tangential, shocking punchline? For example: “So… I was on the bus the other day and, long story short, I’ve now got a pig’s kidney.”  Well, long story short, I’ve completed Blood On The Sand. You bastard, Richie. I know.  How did I get to this point? Well that’s a long story, but the keywords would be ‘achievement’, ‘whore’, ‘quite’, ‘likes’,’ co-op’, ‘shooters’, ‘as’, ‘long’, ‘as’, ‘he’, ‘doesn’t’, ‘have’, ‘to’, ‘play’, ‘with’, and ‘randoms’. Okay, that’s actually the whole story. My good co-op buddy on Live had it and told me that it wasn’t too bad… in a lemony kind of way.

ARGH! My citrus addiction must be sated. The one true Lord – whose name is Jif – must have his sacrifice. I love me a good lemon and this game looks like it can be infused into bathroom cleaning products for the ultimate sparkling finish. A cursory look at TrueAchievements indicated that it was also quite the doable gamerscore max as well. Oh fuck me, Lord. Why hast thou created me this way?

Blood On The Sand is truly fucking stupid. It starts off in Genericostan where Mr Cent is finishing a concert, only to find that his TEN MILLION DOLLAR fee has been stolen from his promoter. Ten million dollars to drawl uncharismatically through the laziest hip-hop dog shit you’ve ever heard? Fucking unbelievable plot point number one. Amusingly, Cent is dressed in a flak jacket, complete with rifles and grenades. Actual live grenades. The health and safety Nazis must be lax in Typicalostan; at least as lax as their hip hop listening standards.  Anyway, Cent decides that it’d be fair to kill the promoter instead, but the promoter has (hidden in a safe) a crystal-encrusted skull recently valued on the Antiques Roadshow at roughly ten million dollars. Happy with this arrangement, Cent takes the skull and leaves – presumably to go and bother some other made up country with his weakly-delivered hip hop piss.

Long story short… bitch got my skull. Yes, a woman (by default: ‘a bitch’) has got Mr Cent’s crystal-encrusted skull – a development that irks the purveyor of moronic, lisped rhymes enough for him to shoot everyone he sees. Bitch’s employer (a region-destabilising paramilitary fuckwit who has a decent working knowledge of Cent’s terrible back catalogue) then decides to sacrifice hundreds of goons and lots of expensive military hardware to stop the untrained Cent and his crew of pathetic yes-men, the G-Unit, from retrieving said skull.

Longer story short… Cent is a fucking twat. This isn’t an opinion, it’s right there on the screen. Everything he does and says is either horrible, offensive or massively stupid. Every action in the game is enhanced to a horrible degree by a huge setlist of fuck-awful selections from Cent’s back catalogue, including such fascinating lyrics as ‘Nigger my gun go off’ and ‘I’m into having sex, I ain’t into making love. So come give me a hug if you in to getting robbed’. Indeed, throughout the game Cent is portrayed as a misogynistic idiot with absolutely no moral compass and an almost pathological greed.  When it transpires that Bitch only stole your motherfucking crystal-encrusted skull to order because her family was being held hostage, his response perfectly sums up a man with absolutely no humanity: “and your point is?” Oh fuck you, Cent. Presumably, given that the game carries his name, likeness, music and voice, Cent is completely happy with his portrayal in the game, so ipso-facto what a massive helmet he must be.

However, when you and your co-op buddy (playing as a member of G-Unit, Cent’s personal group of male felatrixes) are in the middle of an ambush, indiscriminately shooting people and detonating explosives, the game catches a wave of momentum that rarely lets up, making it at least more exciting and enjoyable than the terribly pedestrian Army of Two titles. It is still an exercise in by-the-book running and gunning with little or no surprises, however. There are turret sections and boss battles with helicopters – practically mandatory in games of this type – but it holds together competently enough and the co-op play is worthwhile just so that your friend and you can chortle incredulously at the unintentionally hilarious lines that Cent and his band of merry sycophants spew out. Although hearing Tony Yayo say “I’m going to kill your whole generation” every few minutes gets a little trying after a while.

Philosophically speaking, there are probably issues to be raised with a game like this. The complete and utter bastardness of the game’s protagonist, mixed with his unrelenting stupidity, is enough to make you worry that a focus group somewhere thought that there was a market for this.  Co-op play and achievable gamerscore aside, this is a game with no charm or humour, just an unrelenting spiral into a twat’s ego, where Cent wears his stupidity and arrogance like a badge of honour; it just makes him look like the dumbest wanker on the planet. It’s like when you are walking along and you suddenly hear obscenely loud dance music playing from a car. You look across and some fuckwitted teenager is there, having his internal organs liquidised by the bass, thinking that the people in the street are thinking “ooh he’s so cool with his loud music” when, in fact, most people are thinking “I hope you die in a fucking fireball you chav cocksucker.”

This isn’t a review and it’s certainly not a recommendation, but it’s not a warning to stay away either. I mean, it’s lemony fun and a little bit of IQ tourism if you want to see what it’s like to be as thick as shit, with no taste. Pay a fiver or so (pre-owned for fuck’s sake, you don’t want to give this man a penny of your money) and you’ll get your money’s worth, but it’ll leave you hating the world a bit and mourning the death of hip-hop. So be warned.

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