Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Highly addictive"

Grand Theft Auto IV continues with the newest DLC expansion pack: The Ballad of Gay Tony. Like the previous expansion Lost and the Damned, The Ballad of Gay Tony is a spin off of one of GTA IV's many characters, that being the titular Gay Tony. You take on the role of Luis Fernando Lopez, a night club manager that works for Gay Tony, and your story begins during one of GTA IV's biggest missions: the bank heist.

The Ballad of Gay Tony is about the three Bs: Bigger, Badder, and Better. It takes everything that made GTA IV and Lost and the Damned great, and makes it stupendous. From the very beginning, the game presents you with a fast-paced story featuring some incredibly hilarious and interesting characters, both old and new faces. The story's driven by action-packed and way over the top missions that will have Luis doing everything from jacking an armed helicopter and blowing up a yacht to stealing a subway passenger car. A new mechanic has also been introduced in The Ballad of Gay Tony, and that's the parachute. Whether it's side missions or integral story missions, the game makes great use of this new device. You never experienced adrenaline in a GTA game like this.

When you need to come down for a bit and just want to mellow out for the evening, the game provides plenty of things to do. The game's theme is the nightlife, and there's no such thing as a nightlife without clubs. Gay Tony owns two, the Maisonette 9 and Hercules, and Luis can participate in club managing mini games where he'll play the role of bouncer and eventually score with a female co-worker of his. When not on the job, Luis can partake in dancing and drinking mini-games as well.

As with GTA IV and Lost and the Damned, building and maintaining relationships is still an important and rewarding facet in the game. Your two closest companions Armando and Henrique will supply you with some very powerful weaponry and extremely fast cars. When you just want to hang out, there are new things to do in Liberty City such as playing ice hockey and driving balls at the golf range. Unfortunately, favorite past times such as stage shows and bowling have reluctantly become absent.

When it's time for Luis to get down to business, the combat is just as satisfying as the first two games. The cover mechanic for the most part still works pretty well, but the player sticking to the wrong surface remains to be an issue. What makes the combat even more enjoyable is the high-powered arsenal Luis wields. Powerful machine guns, automatic shotguns with explosives shells, and even a gold-plated Uzi Yusef gives him as a gift are just some of the toys he'll be using. Plus, the characters that he goes on missions with will usually supply Luis with enough rounds before he gets started to ensure that he makes it out alive.

The missions are even more enjoyable to play through due to the fact that there are multiple checkpoints. Dying and then restarting at the last check point helps greatly to reduce the amount of frustration you'd otherwise experience by having to start over and over again. The Ballad of Gay Tony also ups the replayability by ranking each mission based on different criteria, and the option to replay each mission opens up after you finish the game.

As great as the amount of content is, it's not without its faults. Shortly into the story, you can undergo drug war missions with Armando and Henrique, but there's absolutely no structure to them. You'll either find a drug vehicle and steal it, hijack a drug vehicle in transit, or steal the stash from the enemy in the middle of a shootout. They're all random, and there's no ability to replay the ones you lost at your leisure. You'll just have to wait until the game gives you the same mission again, and sometimes you'll even do the exact same one you were successful with again. They do little for the game aside from padding the game's length and providing a quick buck.

Street races have also returned, but like everything else in The Ballad of Gay Tony, they are bigger, badder and better. They are now called triathlons and are unlocked after Brucie's brother Mori gives you the first triathlon mission. The races start out with competitors jumping from a helicopter, parachuting to speedboats below, racing ashore and getting into nitro-loaded supercars. It may be fun to unleash a nitro and go amazingly fast, but you'll soon realize that it's an instant recipe for disaster as the controls simply can't accommodate steering a car that fast. There's also only three triathlons available in the city, so the novelty of the races wears off relatively quickly, and you don't even earn an achievement for finishing them, so there's not much incentive to race them all.

Graphically, The Ballad of Gay Tony looks nearly identical to its predecessors, maybe with a little extra polish here and there. For the most part, it's inherited the same textures, the same environmental structures and physics engines, and of course the same visual glitches. Still, its expansive setting is something that other games struggle to match to this day, and its attention to the little details such as people reacting to what you do help give the game a life of its own. Special effects have been improved a little, most notably the explosions as blowing things up is more satisfying.

The sound effects also help add to the game's visuals, again namely with the explosions. They seem to have a little more kick to them, and the gunfire still sounds as crisp and sharp as ever. The Ballad of Gay Tony has also received more music to its soundtrack specializing in Latin and dance music to help establish the game's nightlife theme. As with all the Grand Theft Auto games, the voice acting is top natch. Every member of the cast never outshines the other, and they all deliver their performances with such a natural expression. The dialogue also is some of the best written for any Grand Theft Auto game.

Simply put, Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony fires on all cylinders. It gives you faster cars. It gives you deadlier weaponry. It gives you more thrilling moments. It's concentrated adrenaline infused with testosterone supplied to you intravenously. The high literally never comes down, that is until you beat the game, and even then, you have instant access to a tank and an armored helicopter to wreak extreme havoc on Liberty City. Not only is The Ballad of Gay Tony the best GTA spin off Rockstar has produced, but it's also one of the most brilliant DLC expansions ever released. If you own GTA IV, then you need to experience Gay Tony's ballad.