There's blood on our hands – we're playing 50 Cent: Bulletproof on PSP

If we played one stomach-churning game at E3 it was 50 Cent: Bulletproof. But despite the dreadful reviews scored by the PlayStation 2 version, it wasn't the quality of the game that was the issue. Instead, it was its sheer brutality .

Of course, considering the career of Curtis James Jackson III – this is a man who has been shot nine times, stabbed once and has ongoing verbal feuds with at least half a dozen other rappers – it's probably fair to say anything that happens in a computer game is pretty mild compared to reality.

Still a game in which you kill everything that moves, with extra detailed cutscene-lead killing moves, and where there's the option of kicking extra cash of out the enemies you've just left in bloody heaps on the pavement, is clearly going to branded with an 18+ stamp, if not the opprobrium of the tabloid press.

Yet despite the level of violence and gore, it does attempt some interesting cross-over (or more accurately cross-promotion) features too.

As well as offering up a game, 50 Cent: Bulletproof makes full use of the PSP's multimedia features with audio and movie components. Linking into 50 Cent's G-Unit label, the UMD will contain 160 music tracks and 16 videos, as well as a four-part, 40-minute documentary. You'll also be able to set up your own playlists using the music supplied to provide the background to the in-game action.

50 Cent's G-Unit clothes label is also brought into play in multiplayer modes such as King of Bling, where instead of kicking cash out of your opponents, you gain jewellery from deploying the toe of your sneakers. Cash earned in the game can be used to buy multiplayer outfits, with available characters including rappers like Dr Dre and Eminem.

It's important to point out too that this game has been made by a different studio to the woeful console version, which has ditched the previous third-person perspective to a more widescreen friendly topdown viewpoint. The basic story and the cutscene appearances of 50 Cent remain the same, however.

The game mechanics themselves are relatively straightforward and involve using whatever weapons you have at your disposal – mainly melee-based, but there are plenty of ammo-limited guns around too – in order to kill everything that moves. The game's auto-aiming system makes the pain easy to dish out, with roleplaying-style health points popping out of your target so you can see the effect of your thuggish actions.

Another option is for you to take a gang member hostage and use them as a human shield to protect yourself when you're outnumbered, which is something that happens fairly regularly. You can also steal weapons from enemies, if you're feeling out-gunned, although this is more fiddly to do; the amount of times you can do such actions is limited by your stamina meter, which also controls your ability to perform counter-attacks.

Despite these ideas, it's probably still fair to say that this is a game that will appeal almost exclusively to gangsta rap fans in general, or maybe even 50 Cent fans exclusively. Certainly it's not tailor made for us skinny alt-country lovers.

50 Cent: Bulletproof is due for release sometime in the autumn.