With the wave of super-serious gritty shooters that have come our way over the last few months it's with great delight that rapper megastar and gangsta supremo Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson's latest video game offering dropped onto my mat the other day. No, really. Fiddy’s previous outing - Bulletproof - for all its failings was a fun game to play in short bursts as the sheer over-the-top presentation of the game and perhaps unintentional humour was great in short doses. 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand has grown up a little since then, but thankfully not too much.

The story starts with a vague cut-scene that was so badly explained that the box blurb summed up the story better: Fiddy and G-Unit have just finished playing a sell-out tour in a fictional middle-eastern country, which must be pretty nasty as in the scenes he's performing in a G-Unit customised kevlar jacket with a string of grenades on it! Anyway, instead of taking cash payment for the gigs he was offered a human diamond-encrusted skull, apparently worth $10 million. Needless to say with a whole country that is apparently full of terrorists, arms dealers or gangsters something is going to go down and 50 is ambushed, and in his words ' that bitch got mah skull'... Time to get it back then.

Taking these games as a rough model 50 Cent's trademark personality is imprinted on the presentation and gameplay. Cut scenes frequently show Fiddy badmouthing or strong-arming some criminal in order to recover his skull. The dialogue, meant to sound all tough and macho ends up sounding a bit camp but that was why I enjoyed it so much: the macho image Fifty and G-Unit want to present of themselves throughout the game is so unbelievable it's laughable. In a place even the US Army doesn't want to get involved in Fifty Cent happily strolls in with a couple of mates, tools up and manages to wipe out the entire criminal underworld single-handedly.

However the lack of real difficulty in no way prevented me from enjoying this game. A lot. The pace is completely frantic, with little time to stop and look around before you're shoved into another firefight or bustled into the next area to find one. If throwing molotov cocktails made from bottles of Courvoisier while shouting (swearwords changed for fluffier ones): you fluffin' motherfluffer!' isn't great fun then running right up to the terrorists and killing them using Ju-Jitsu is!

The guns are great fun, with pistols, assault, close combat and special weapons mapped to the D-pad. You start off with fairly decent weapons but towards the end you're using completely outrageous weapons - I was running around with a dismounted MG and firing cluster missiles at enemies with a tricked-out rocket launcher!

You can buy these weapons by collecting the cash dropped by dead enemies, this disappears quickly so it tempts you to run greedily through the game hoovering it all up. You can also smash open the multitude of crates littered across the levels and collect 'bling' (just like real life then). As well as new weapons the money can also be used to buy more 'counterkill' moves and insults containing even more profanity which can be levelled at the enemy by way of the ‘taunt’ button...

There are other bits that don't work so well either. The levels are strewn with cover, assuming you'll move between one and the other across the levels. However if I did that I'd still be playing the game - it just doesn't fit the fast pace of the game and given the difficulty it's not needed anyway. When you do actually try to use cover I found it mostly unhelpful. Usually when you leant out the camera would block a view of anything or Fifty's gun would conveniently be aimed right at a concrete pillar. Either way you're able to hit nothing. Sometimes the game seemed to let you choose between leaning left or right out of cover, which is useful to solve the above problems, but most of the time it would only go one way, which naturally, was the wrong way.

In addition to collecting cash you also rack up a points score throughout the level, generally awarded for killing enemies in different ways, which are then strung together if you keep killing in quick succession. Through the levels there are timed spot challenges such as 'kill 2x snipers', which if completed throw more points at you. These points aren't really used for anything except unlocking artwork and a big load of 50 Cent's back catalogue, which pumps out during gameplay, so I never really saw it as an important let alone integral part of gameplay.

With almost everything unlocked from the first play and no real difficulty or incentive to play through again it's hard to recommend this to purchase unless you really like the 50 Cent music, or really want to be a gangster but are scared of guns. Weirdest of all was the inclusion of co-op play but no split-screen, which would have doubled the replay value instantly.

Although it borrows from AAA titles such as Gears they've got nothing to fear from this OTT arcade shooter, which despite being great fun offers nothing for someone looking for an immersive, challenging game that lasts more than five minutes