Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad Of Gay Tony (Xbox 360) Review
The Brutal Gamer review of GTA: The Ballad Of Gay Tony.
It’s been just over 18 months since Grand Theft Auto IV hit our consoles, and the first Xbox 360 exclusive DLC ‘The Lost And Damned’ came out 10 whole months later. Now we have the second piece of DLC, ‘The Ballad Of Gay Tony’.
In TBoGT, you play the part of Luis Lopez, business partner of Liberty City nightclub empresario ‘Gay’ Tony Prince. The main storyline involves Tony having taken out loans with various people and running up huge amounts of debt, and Luis has to do jobs for these people in order to try and settle these debts.
This DLC starts at the bank robbery scene in the host game, with most of the story taking place around the glitzy nightlife of Algonquin. This being an expansion, graphically speaking little has changed. While still looking pretty good, with the scale of Liberty City as impressive as ever, the animation is starting to look a little jerky. Also, the engine occasionally strains when things get insanely busy, with the frame rate dropping noticeably and making a couple of missions frustrating.
The atmosphere in the city and in the clubs which you manage are as convincing as ever. TBoGT also has a range of different characters. Tony does comes across as a whiny drug addict, and Luis seems to look down on the addicts and criminals around him, despite coming across as being a much worse person himself, and the two just aren’t sympathetic at all. Also, the extremely casual use of racial and homophobic slurs in the game really just come across as silly.
However, TBoGT also has two of the most memorable and hilarious characters in the whole GTA IV storyline. First, there’s billionaire property developer Yusuf Amir, excellently voiced by comedian Omid Djalili. He’s a fun loving, coke taking, materialistic man who wants to eventually buy all of Liberty City, and whose father is disappointed with his materialistic ways. He also has all his personal possessions gold plated, from his phone to his personal UZI. He has you stealing several weird and wonderful vehicles from a subway train to an APC. There’s also Brucie’s short, bullying older brother Mori Kibbutz, who is one of the people Tony owes money to. One of his missions involves Luis, Mori and Brucie stealing some sports cars and driving them around a narrow dock pathway, with the police in pursuit, with Mori having called them on himself for some fun. The dialogue between the three characters in this scene is highly entertaining, and the ending scene is also funny.
TBoGT starts off slow for the first couple of hours, with the usual GTA combination of taking people to a particular location, killing a particular person and so on. The initial cut scenes are a bit dull as well, and the fact that the missions for Luis’ mother involve doing jobs to get her out of debt really adds to the repetition at the start. However, get through those first couple of hours and things really do pick up, which missions becoming more varied and interesting as the storyline progresses. The criss-cross between this and the main story is interesting, allowing you to see some aspects of the story from a different point of view.
Helicopters seems to be one of the main focuses of this expansion, with quite a few of the missions involving flying a helicopter. This also involves the return of the parachute and base jumping to GTA, with a lot of side missions and a whole new multiplayer mode based on base jumping. One of my favourite helicopter based missions involves Luis and Tony flying a celebrity blogger above the Statue of Happiness and throwing him out, only for Luis to jump out after him and catch him before opening his parachute and landing safely on the ground below, scaring the blogger into being much nicer about Tony and his clubs.
TBoGT has a couple of other new features, such as the new explosive shotgun, where the shells explode on contact with a target in a nice bit of fireworks, as well as a P90, which us just another machine gun basically. It would have been nice for some more varieties of weapons. There are also checkpoints introduced to the missions, so if you fail after a certain point, you don’t have to start the entire mission again from scratch if you choose to replay from the text message.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Overall, The Ballad Of Gay Tony is a fine note on which to end the GTA IV story. It does start off a bit slow, but once you get a couple of hours into it the missions get much more interesting and the base jumping is great fun, as are some of the wild characters you’re introduced to. Admittedly, the core gun play and cover mechanics feel even more clunky these days than they did originally. But with over 10 hours of gameplay, not including multiplayer, you’re getting a fantastic chunk of content for your money. Rockstar have shown how DLC should be handled with this. If you want more GTA in your life, then there’s no reason not to pick this up.
User Score:
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