If you want to bring some of your real life crew into the game with you, the game sports drop-in, drop-out co-op with your partner taking on the role of G-Unit. Co-op is seamless with no lag to speak of and makes the game much more manageable, especially on the higher difficulty levels. Best of all, any weapons that you have purchased in your single player game can be brought into your buddy's co-op game. This is especially important considering that I can't spend a single minute away from my Fabrique.

With everything going on in the game, it's a shame that it ends up being so repetitive. Oh sure, it ramps up in difficulty pretty nicely, and the shooting missions are punctuated with a couple of driving missions and one on rails mission where you're firing out of a helicopter, but the shooting missions all end up feeling the same. The enemies don't change in appearance much from beginning to end, and the scenarios all fall under the same basic types. Either kill enemy type A, kill all of the reinforcements or collect a bunch of money. Even all of the boss battles are the same with Fiddy et al taking on someone in a helicopter gunship. I love a good helicopter fight as much as the next guy, but by the third one, I was ready for something new. The use of slow motion "Gangsta Time" helps to mix things up a little, but it's not like we haven't seen that game mechanic a dozen times already.

It certainly looks very good with plenty of detailed environments. The frame rate keeps up most of the time, with slowdowns only really occurring when there's a lot of action and you're trying to use a scoped weapon. The varying weapons all have meaty retorts and feel different making it easy for the player to settle in on a preferred weapon for the various situations. Being as this is a 50 Cent game, there are plenty of musical tracks to choose from, as long as you like 50 Cent. As you progress through the game, you'll unlock additional tracks, all of which can be managed from the game's music player. If instrumentals are more your thing, you can choose to remove all of the tracks and just listen to the Swizz Beatz provided instrumentals.

Once you're done with the game, figure about seven hours for a play through on normal, there's not much of a reason to go back and play it, unless you're looking to get all of gold badges, or you want to enjoy it via co-op. Course, if you're a 50 Cent fanatic, you'll no doubt enjoy the cornucopia of music videos unlocked while playing the game. I mean, really, who doesn't enjoy "Wanksta"?

At the end of the day, if you can look past the utterly stupid story and just enjoy the game for what it is, a fast paced, high scoring, arcade shooter, you'll probably find yourself having a lot of fun. Real 50 Cent fans will no doubt enjoy the various songs, videos and priceless banter between Fiddy and the rest of G-Unit. For the rest of you, well, you'll just have to be satisfied with getting extra points for using the "Gangsta Time" to detonate a rocket in the air, taking out the guy who fired it in the process. If that doesn't do anything for you, there's always Peggle.

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