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Following the original GTA IV and The Lost and Damned add-ons, The Ballad of Gay Tony always had mighty big shoes to fill. Can the latest Grand Theft Auto installment keep Liberty City on our list of favourite fictional hotspots? Read our full GTA IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony review and find out!
Rockstar is getting impatient, that much is clear. While GTA IV and even The Lost and Damned eased you into the Grand Theft Auto universe with a gentle learning curve and plenty of tutorials, The Ballad of Gay Tony drops you right in at the deep end. OK, there’re the on-screen prompts to remind you how to fist fight or take cover, but on the whole, it’s straight into the action.
That’s no bad thing, and means less time doing donkeywork for low-rent gangsters, and more time zipping about in speedboats, helicopters and high performance cars.
GTA IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony first play!
That’s right: all the goodies GTA kept for later levels in previous instalments are opened up from the very start. The Ballad of Gay Tony gives you tons of new toys to play with, and it doesn’t end with vehicles.
There are a handful of new weapons, including the addictively destructive sticky bombs, as well as parachutes, in a first for the GTA 4 world.
There are also new side-missions. Head to a club, and you’ll be able to hit the dancefloor, jiggling the controller to jive along with the music, impress the “ladies” and successfully pull off moves. Don’t get too excited though, there’s no Hot Coffee action here, instead your successful strutting is rewarded with… a group dance routine.
More gritty is The Ballad of Gay Tony’s bare knuckle fighting club, where you can hone your face-bashing with tournaments, and earn a few extra quid.
So far, it’s business as usual for a GTA expansion. More of this, and a few improvements to that. But The Ballad of Gay Tony’s story line is really worth diving into. It sees you acting as bodyguard to night club impresario Anthony “Gay Tony” Prince, balancing your professional commitments with family concerns and personal friendships.
It’s another example of Rockstar’s superb storytelling, and while attempts to contextualise it with frequent references to “the recession” and “failing economies” jar a little, they’re soon out of the way and forgotten when the shooting begins, which is almost immediately. Who said impatience was a bad thing?
Great game, enjoying it
http://bit.ly/4jy8W9
Fantastic isn’t it? Uber silly.
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