GTA IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony Review
This title has also been released under the standalone "Episodes from Liberty City" pack
Long time readers may be well aware of my disappointment when it came to “the greatest game of all time ever” Grand Theft Auto IV being released. Despite the jump in visual quality, to me it seemed like Rockstar had stripped a lot of the really fun elements from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas out and replaced them with questionable gameplay mechanics. Gone was the expansive feeling of the game’s world, replaced by a cramped three-island city without much to explore. Also gone was a lot of the crazier mini-games, which had been replaced by compulsory bowling/theatre-going to keep your contacts happy.
So when I heard that Rockstar’s latest DLC episode, The Ballad of Gay Tony, was going to return skydiving to the game, I was interested to find out if they were looking to recapture the feel of their older games.
The result, however, was a very confusing mix of both good and bad choices when it comes to gameplay. In a sense, it truly is a ballad, a narrative set to music, but the music is distracting and the narrative doesn’t jump in to pick up the slack. I’ll explain what the hell I’m on about in just a second, suffice to say that in the end I didn’t really enjoy our second DLC story in Liberty City.
In The Ballad of Gay Tony, players take the role of Luis Lopez, the brawn of a business partner relationship with the titular “Gay” Tony Prince. Gay Tony owns two of the most popular nightclubs in town, one gay, one straight, but is up to his eyeballs in debt and has effectively sold the clubs to two seperate groups. During the game, Luis has to attempt to keep the nightclubs afloat amongst pressure from several warring factions who want to control them, and keep Gay Tony from getting killed, killing himself or overdosing on perscription pills.
Let it not be said that the life of a nightclub manager was always going to be an easy one.
