50 Cent: Bulletproof tries to be everything a third-person shooter can be. It features dual-wielding with an ability to mix different weapons, a cover system, animated "quick" kills, unlockables, an ability to use objects or humans as shields, NPC companions, ability to loot bodies and probably some other shit I'm forgetting about. The problem is that half of these features seem to be thrown into the game randomly and don't interact with its systems, and the other half are just not well-executed.

If I was trying to fix the game, I'd probably turn it into a proper cover-based shooter like Gears of War or something, because that seems to be the only gameplay loop that works here. The shooting is very precision-based and, for some reason, the aiming here is done in Deus Ex's style, which makes no sense for this type of game. Deus Ex is an RPG, and there its aiming system reflects your accuracy skill, which can be leveled up with experience. But Bulletproof is a shooter, where your aiming is completely up to your actual real-life skill with the gamepad. So why do I have to wait for the reticle to narrow down to increase the accuracy? This means the best strategy is to keep your distance from the enemies and snipe them out. Also, when you're in cover, your reticle narrows down faster, allowing you to take out enemies faster. Literally my favorite part in the game was that one tiny segment on a subway train where there's plenty of cover and the enemies also keep their distance. Unfortunately, that's the only section in the game where they do that. In most cases they'll charge you, making the aiming system completely redundant. So just run around with an automatic weapon and spray.

"Quick" kills (called here "counter kills") are supposed to alleviate this problem. But there's a reason I put "quick" in quotations. For some reason they're in a very slow slow-mo, which means they completely kill the flow of the game. They even stop the music just to make sure you really don't wanna use them ever.

Grabbing objects or humans and using them as shields is very unreliable. Only specific objects can be grabbed, and I don't understand why sometimes I can grab people and other times I can't. But it still doesn't really affect the gameplay in any noticeable way other than obscuring your vision a little bit. The enemies won't behave differently, and the game is not so hard that you really ever need to use this mechanic.

Like I mentioned earlier, you can unlock stuff with in-game currency. If you're a fan of G-Unit, you're gonna wanna buy all the music because the game allows you to let it play in the background. There are also music videos, which are irrelevant now because they're all on youtube. Then there's the quick-kills, which are basically just different animations and are kinda useless mechanically. The only really useful thing to spend your money on is the weapons and ammo, and that doesn't really give you access to a lot of new guns. In most cases I already had all the guns I needed, so I rarely ever spent money on anything. Which is good because you can forget about looting bodies.

Idk who thought it was a good idea to make the player stop in the middle of the action and hold down square over each enemy corpse. Yet another thing that completely kills the flow. And it's not like you can clear out the room first because the bodies will disapper in like 10 seconds, so you really have to do that shit while there are other enemies running around and shooting at you.

But honestly, if you just ignore (which you can do) all of the "cool features" and just treat it as a basic third-person shooter, it kinda works. It would've been much more fun though if the game wasn't yet another victim of consolification. It being stuck on PS2 introduces problems that simply wouldn't be there on PC. For example, there's clearly a need for more buttons. For example, the "Use" button is the same button you use for reloading, sticking to walls, looting, perfomring quick-kills and swapping your weapon with the one on the floor. This obviously introduces a lot of problems. Like often you'll swap your weapon in the midst of the battle when you just wanted to reload because the floors are usually covered with weapons of dead enemies. Also, if you're standing over a corpse and your clip is not full, it doesn't matter whether you hold square or press it, 50 Cent will reload the weapon. Problems like this could've been completely avoided on PC. Also, I suspect that the game wouldn't have had its weird aiming system if it wasn't trying to compensate for the limitations of the analogue-aiming.

I think easily the biggest problem of the game though is how a lot of the objects you have to interact with to complete the mission tasks are completely unremarkable. This has led me to get stuck several times, not knowing what I'm supposed to do. The game isn't being very clear with the task descriptions either. For example "destroy the evidence" may mean anything. Turns out it was a bunch of TVs with a bunch of tiny VCRs or something next to them. I destroyed the TVs, but I didn't even notice the VCRs because they didn't look like something destructible. They completely blended in with the environment. And the same can be said about a lot of important items in the game.

The final thing I'll comment on is the story. It's there, and it's apparently written by Terence Winter of the Sopranos fame, who also wrote Get Rich or Die Tryin', 50 Cent's biopic. I think he always does a good job, but here I just feel like there isn't really enough room for him to develop characters or themes. I can tell that the writing is witty and will make you chuckle every now and then, but the story overall is nothing to write home about. The overall direction of the cutscenes is pretty Sam Raimi with crash zooms and rapid editing, which is cool.

Overall, I think 50 Cent: Bulletproof is a flawed, but interesting title because of its aspirations. It was too ambitious for its own good, but it's still kinda cool to see what an odd beast it resulted in. I think there's definitely a lot of charm to it, and the core gameplay works fine enough that you can have your fun with it. But it is not a "good" game. It's a struggle, with moments of brilliance and fun scattered throughout. But goddamn it do I love its atmosphere, and ofc, as a lifelong G-Unit fan, I love the music.

P.S. Ironically, the PSP "version" (an entirely different game) is a much simpler, but much more coherent project. I wouldn't say it's better necessarily because you kinda get much less with it, but, for what it is, it's totally a more polished and functioning product.