If there's one thing worse than a bad game, it's an utterly mediocre, forgettable, uninspired, derivative, but marginally competent game like 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. In a month, no one will be playing. In two months, copies will pile up in the back rooms of used game stores. In three months, you'll come across it in a bargain bin somewhere and wonder if it's worth your money or time. Bookmark this page to remind yourself that the answer is no.

Get up-close and in-person with fatality mini-games.

If, however, you're an immortal with limitless time and a burning desire to experience every shooter ever created, you could do worse than this. To its credit, Blood on the Sand knows to steal from good games. You can see the inspiration here, but it only goes to the level of basic bullet points. There's no sense that the developers understand the whys and wherefores of what makes certain features work. Instead, it's as if they learned about design from reading the backs of game boxes. So you get the health recovery from Halo, the Bullet Time from Max Payne, the cover system from Rainbow Six: Vegas, the co-op gameplay from Gears of War, the scoring multipliers from The Club, the Quick Time Events from God of War, and the crate-smashing loot grab from Ratchet & Clank. Mix together, pour over a generic Middle Eastern setting, apply character model of a famous rapper, and, voil?!, it's a game. Perhaps the only unique bit of gameplay is a quest system that seems a bit like a massively multiplayer online game's. You'll be given a timed objective that earns you a score bonus if you accomplish it. For instance: Collect a certain amount of money, kill the machine-gunner, or eliminate all the incoming reinforcements. Do the task and you get extra points.

Not that the scoring plays into the game in any meaningful manner. The scoring system and unlockables might be good for completionists, but it's a pretty desperate completionist who focuses his attention on this game. The scoring here is nowhere near as pure as the system that drives The Club, a much better indeterminate shooter that becomes something else entirely when the gameplay is built around the scoring. But in Blood on the Sand, the scoring feels like an afterthought, slathered onto the game so that there's always something happening. A headshot bonus here, a double-kill multiplier there, and it makes the game feel like there's a whole lot more going on than shooting the four enemies that just spawned before moving on to the next checkpoint. It's all scoring smoke and multiplier mirrors.

The 10 "missions" in Blood on the Sand are each chopped into multiple segments. You're awarded a bronze, silver or gold medallion based on your score when you reach the checkpoint. Your first playthrough will net you a bronze. If you replay the entire mission and try to finesse the score multipliers, accumulating style kills before a timer expires, you can grab silvers. As for gold medals, well, who knows? I can't imagine anyone caring enough about this game to the point of getting good enough to go for gold medals. And this coming from a guy who obsessively played The Club.

Obligatory helicopter boss battle? Check! In fact, multiple times!

But one of the main problems with Blood on the Sand is that it's such a featherweight shooter. The guns all feel polite and largely the same, instead of having any heft, kick or character. There's plenty of ammo, and the QTE fatalities are limited to a single button. Enemies are brain-dead, with the difficulty level being strictly a factor of how many bullets it takes to kill them. Any time new enemies spawn in, a helpful red marker warns you before they arrive. Checkpoints are liberally scattered through the game, so death, thy sting is AWOL. In fact, you even keep the money you've earned when you die, which underscores how easy it is to come by and therefore how worthless it is.

The story -- don't worry, this will be brief -- concerns 50 Cent chasing a gem-encrusted skull stolen from him by a Lara Croft-a-like and spirited away through some unspecified Middle Eastern country. Every single level takes place in the same vaguely war-torn town populated by the same Arabic-esque fighters. While you might expect a little amusing cheese from the cut scenes, there's no such thing here. Instead, it's just tough thug talk, such as "I'm gonna kill you!", "Where's my money?", "Bitch set me up!", and so on. The levels are strictly linear, although there did seem to be a single choice of paths somewhere around Chapter 7. There are two bad driving sequences, one in lieu of a final boss battle, and one bad helicopter shooting gallery.

There's something oddly mean-spirited about Blood on the Sand. If you've ever been to a friendly softball game or a LAN party where someone oversteps the boundaries of friendly trash-talking, you'll know what it's like to play this game. For some reason scientists don't fully understand, there's an invisible line between "Suck it!" and "Say my name you effing whore!" as a videogame taunt. The former works. The latter, uh, not so much. "Say my name you effing whore"? Really, 50 Cent? Furthermore, behind the weapon upgrades and pointless fatality animations, you can purchase taunts. Click the left analog stick to play various gangsta bon mots from Mr. Cent himself. The point? Search me.

Notably absent is the N-word, although I do have to wonder about a random villain showing up late in the game, appropriately white and Southern, taunting 50 Cent with the strongest homophobic epithet you can imagine, preceded by the F-word to give it extra bite. Believe it or not, I'm totally okay with swearing and inappropriate humor. Ah, the sweet dulcet tones of the repeated and gratuitous use of the F-word in House of the Dead: Overkill, and even the occasional elliptical homophobic jibe! But it's all about context and tone. What does it say when a game that so assiduously avoids any racial angle is more than happy to let loose when it comes to homosexuality? At this point, they might as well have gone whole hog with a little anti-Semitism thrown in for good measure.

Peace in the Middle East? Not while Fiddy's on the job!

Then there are the toadies who accompany the main character, each obligingly offering compliments for the most unimpressive rote kills, door openings and level completes. Dudes, just shut up. You're only saying that because I'm rich and famous and you're not. I can hear it in your voice. You're not teammates or even sidekicks. You're sycophants. The only reason they're in here is for the cooperative gameplay, which is cooperative in the sense that someone else might be playing at the same time as you. A game like Resident Evil, Gears of War or Rainbow Six works great cooperatively, because there's plenty of meaty tactical gameplay. Running and gunning in tandem isn't much different from running and gunning solo, except for the fact that sometimes the other guy steals your kill. There's no competitive multiplayer, which isn't much of a complaint given that this simply isn't a very good game.

Who is Blood on the Sand for? It's not enough to be a fan of shooters, much less a fan of 50 Cent. It's not even enough to be a fan of shooters and 50 Cent. Instead, you have to be a fan of shooters, 50 Cent, games that aren't very good, and games that only marginally have anything whatsoever to with 50 Cent beyond spending a lot of time staring at the back of his head and occasionally listening to his voice. If that describes you, Blood in the Sand is your kind of game. However, while I played through this pap and let my mind wander, wondering how much longer it was going to go on, I couldn't help but think that even you deserve better.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game purchased by the reviewer.