If you can't get enough of 50 Cent and his posse, there's always G-Unit: Free Yayo, a shooting gallery-style action game (what else?) for your mobile phone. Set in "the not-too-distant future," the game challenges you to free G-Unit cornerstone Tony Yayo from the clutches of an evil corporation that controls all of the world's media...except for G-Unit's pirate broadcasts, that is. So the righteous rappers go in with guns blazing, shooting down any O-Corp robot guard that stands in their way. Some downloadable bonuses give you incentive to stick with this mildly amusing, simple game for a little while, but its seven short and easy levels and unlockable minigame aren't going to keep you busy for more than an hour or two.
There's a surprisingly decent bit of story in Free Yayo, though that's not to say it's great stuff or anything. Imagine a G-Unit cartoon and you've got the idea. The sci-fi premise, complete with flying hoopties, is an unusual place to find the likes of 50 Cent, Lloyd Banks, and Young Buck, all of whom are looking tough and packing guns like always. The game suggests that you get to play as all the different members of G-Unit, which is rather misleading. Apparently, it's Mr. Banks who has to do all the dirty work, but you couldn't tell, since all the shooting happens from a first-person perspective so you don't get any sense of the character you're controlling. In fact, if you stripped away the brief, comic book-style story bits in between the missions, and ignored the hip-hop-style soundtrack, you'd never guess this game had anything to do with G-Unit.
That's because you spend the whole game shooting robots dressed like 1920s mobsters. All you do is use the keys to move your aiming reticle around the screen and press 5 to shoot. Sometimes when you hit stuff, a power-up that increases your health, the mission time, or your ammo shows up, and you can shoot that as well in order to activate it. The robots will sometimes fire on you, and your limited ammo and time limit are also potential concerns, but in practice, it's just not difficult at all to gun down the dozen or two robots needed to move on to the next mission. The missions themselves are all slightly different as well, and a couple of them have you squaring off against a boss opponent. But you're still doing the same thing from start to finish, culminating in a cinch of a final showdown against Yayo's captor.
You're rated after every level based on your accuracy, speed, and other factors, and your final score is cumulative. Achieve a high-enough score and you get access to some downloadable themes and ringtones, which is a nice touch, though the freebies really aren't that plentiful or impressive, even if you earn a high rank. You can also theoretically upload your best score to a global leaderboard, but the leaderboard seems to be tapped out by a couple of players who've found cheap ways of topping off their scores. Besides, this just isn't the kind of game you'll feel compelled to keep practicing at. There's too little challenge. The other unlockable extra is referred to as a minigame, though "minigame" is a fair description of the whole package. In this single bonus mission, rather than move a cursor, you simply press the keys to automatically shoot at one of nine spots in what's basically Whack-a-Mole with guns. It's short and easy.
The cartoonish visuals look pretty nice, though the presentation isn't that great overall. The robots have sort of a neat look to them, but they disappear in little pufflike explosions when shot and basically walk back and forth otherwise. The backgrounds are mostly static, and the members of G-Unit don't look much like their real-life counterparts. Still, the graphics are OK and are at least more satisfying than the audio. While Free Yayo has some nice hip-hop tunes that play during the different stages, that's really all there is to the sound. Gunshot effects and explosions are sorely missing, and their absence makes the core action in the game feel flat.
The good news is that it isn't difficult to reunite Tony Yayo with the rest of his crew. The bad news is that G-Unit: Free Yayo becomes an easy, short game that's not going to be worth the price of admission, except for truly devoted fans. The game has a novel approach, and the shooting gallery-style gameplay works fairly well on a mobile device like our test Sony Ericsson S710a handset. But there's just not a lot to it.
