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Like many other GTA fans I was pretty surprised when I played GTA IV the first time and found that, although it was by all accounts a stellar game, a lot of the features from GTA San Andreas had been dropped. San Andreas was pretty nuts with your reformed gang member CJ getting regular access to insane military hardware: tanks, VTOL jet fighters and all sorts of explosive toys. By comparison Niko’s world was more Martin Scorcese than Michael Bay. Ballad of Gay Tony tries to find a happy medium between the two turning Liberty City into a playground of summer movie destruction but keeping the plot gritty and mean.
Ballad of Gay Tony stars a new protagonist, Dominican playboy Luis Lopez. Where Niko and Johnny K were down on their luck outsiders, Luis is something of a high flier in Liberty City. He had a rough start, cage fighting and drug dealing to support his mum followed by a stint in prison. After prison Luis went to work for Tony Prince, night club owner and underworld entrepreneur. Despite being a scatterbrained coke fiend Tony takes good care of his right hand man and even though Tony has a habit of getting them both in a lot of trouble, Luis is fiercely loyal to his employer for pulling him out of the gutter.
While the characters of Ballad are as solid as you would expect from a Rockstar game the overall plot is surprisingly hit and miss. If you were expecting this episode to be on par with The Lost and Damned you might want to turn down your expectations a notch. Elements of the plot that you’d expect the game to focus on, like Luis and his mother and his relationship with his old drug peddling friends, get glossed over in favour of a parade of loathsome characters sending you on various missions to blow stuff up and shoot lots of people. There’s nothing like the revenge mission of Niko or the eventual confrontation between Johnny K and Billy from Lost to propel the plot in Ballad and that hurts the game a little. The diamond plot that runs in the background of all the GTA IV story lines does get resolved in Ballad, although it does end with a whimper rather than a blast. Overall it feels like Luis's story was only there to connect some of the odder elements of the previous two stories together.
After your first drive by with a gold plated Uzi you'll wonder how you ever drove by with anything else
Disapointment with the plots shortcomings are often buoyed up by the actual missions, while the reasons for doing them are pretty shaky the missions themselves are pretty cool. Helicopters get stolen, then used to blow up cruise ships, massive structures get blown apart, tanks getting airlifted by freight helicopters get shot down and stolen, the missions are consistently five star crazy. Almost every plot mission involves a lot of shooting, car chasing and exploding. One memorable mission is an ‘extreme race’ that starts with skydiving out of a chopper, parachute landing in a speedboat and hitting a bunch of checkpoints, then swapping into a nitrous equipped sports car and tearing across the city.
Of course this wouldn’t be GTA if there wasn’t a bunch of side missions to play with as well. Early in the game you unlock Drug Wars. These icons are dotted all around Liberty City and have you meet with your two buddies and head of for some carnage. Missions are random but could involve busting up a drug deal and killing everyone, then stealing the stuff, chasing down a dealer and killing him then taking his car, or stealing a truck or boat full of drugs and trying to get to the safe house while being pursued. They basically represent action missions on demand. Whenever you want to do some shooting and vehicular carnage the missions are there. There’s also BASE jumping missions dotted around the city to complete using the parachute. They’re a bit trial and error unfortunately and not as much fun as you would think. Random encounters make a return appearance with the occasional figure appearing on your map for a brief five minute diversion.
Ignore my one man off broadway show will you New York? Burn! Burn!
Finally there’s the new option of club management. This was a pretty disappointing part of the game as its mostly just standing around various spots of the night club, then responding to calls from the control room. The emergencies are mostly non interactive and you just watch as Luis throws a drunk out of the club. Occasionally you may have to drive a member of the British royal family to a Korean brothel or pick up take out for a bulimic supermodel but thats about it. The club management isn’t a lot of fun compared to the rest of the game. There’s more fun to be had when you’re not managing the club and can take part in the champagne skulling or dancing mini games.
At least once a night the leggy security room lady at the night club will call you back to the office for an 'emergency', at which point you’ll get down to some overly explicit hank panky. Rockstar seem determined to increase the lewdness of the GTA series exponentially from the original game to each episode and that’s definitely the case with Ballad of Gay Tony. Your character Luis has on screen sexual encounters with ladies at least four times in the course of normal gameplay. Of course these aren’t Heavy Rain or Final Fantasy graphics so it looks like a Barbie and a GI Joe getting bashed together with some salty language over the top. Not exactly titillating stuff but it’s raunchier than any game I can think of before it.
Now I'll just winch this crate of champagne down to the clients yacht and... oh... the winch is THIS button
I should also mention the new tools you get to play with in Ballad. In the Lost and the Damned the addition of a few weapons was pretty nifty, but nothing compared to the arsenal you get your hands on in Ballad. Early missions have you cooking fools with a silenced P90, a fully automatic shotgun that rips vehicles to bits, a new military sniper rifle, a light machine gun, remote detonated satchel charges. It’s like the arsenal from Modern Warfare 2 went for a holiday in Liberty City. There’s a bunch new sports cars, helicopters and boats to play with as well and some of the rarer vehicles like the labourghini impersonating Infernus are much more common on the streets of Liberty in the expansion. The multiplayer adds in all these new toys to use in races and death matches but doesn't include any fun modes other than BASE Jumping which can be done in Free Play. Nothing as fun as Chopper Vs. Choppa from Lost and the Damned.
Rather than a final swan song for Grand Theft Auto IV, one of the best games of the decade, The Ballad of Gay Tony feels more like a nod and a wink for fans of the game engine who wanted to see more explosions, more sex and more bling. After impressively bucking the trend of more flamboyant impersonators with The Lost and Damned episode I’m a little surprised that Rockstar delivered a game that does go way over the top set piece wise, but doesn’t quite deliver the terrific crime fiction we’ve come to expect. Reading this back it sounds far more negative than I meant it to, truth is The Ballad of Gay Tony is topshelf gameplay and one of the best pieces of DLC you could ever pick up. It’s just that this is the final episode of GTA IV and ‘pretty damn good’ doesn’t quite feel like ‘as good as it could have been’.
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