Ballad of Gay Tony Review – “Something to sing and Dance over?”

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Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony - Review

The Ballad of Gay Tony is the final release for Grand Theft Auto IV on the Xbox360, obviously not ruling out the chance of anything special coming to the Playstation 3 later on. We’ve already had 1 amazing add-on (The Lost and the Damned – first game to be awarded a 10/10 on the site) but can the Ballad of Gay Tony sing the right song we’re after?

“Gonna shoot that n**** square in the face”

Story – 7

The story begins with you being one of the poor souls being held up in the GTA IV bank job, your luck clearly isn’t with you on this day. This obviously allows you to understand when the story arch begins in the game, as GTA IV players will know where abouts on the game’s time line it is placed.

With a gun to your head and then the bank robbery going sour you get your first encounter with your boss Tony Prince (Gay Tony). From here onwards you find out that he’s worth a lot of bling and has a rather wealthy background with his clubbing businesses. However, he’s borrowed off a loan shark and well…the rest is history (You totally understand where the story is headed).

Characters just get dull really quickly, everyone is taking drugs and wasting thousands of pounds on alcohol and hookers. Your character (Luis) is just a big brute who looks after Gay Tony, he says no to drugs and generally shags most women in the night clubs (You think I’m joking!? No, you actually watch a handful of fully clothed sex scenes!). All these editions just make the game a massive drug fest and you could give 3 flips if anyone was to die, actually you would prefer them all to shut up.

The guest appearance of the Iranian Comedian Omid Djalili is, without a doubt, a five star performance. Although that’s your lot and you’ve got to understand Omid’s Comedic background to fully enjoy it.

“Uh man, Tony would of come along but sadly he’s at home coke’d out of his face!”

Gameplay – 9

The Ballad of Gay Tony happily welcomes back all of the explosive content which has been lacking from the series. GTA IV had the problem of not being that same game which everyone played in San Andreas, happily seeing the return of exploding trains and planes is always a smiling addition. With new weaponry to aid your rampaging you’ll find yourself firing off a rocket launcher only 3 missions into the game! Now that’s what I’m talking about!

Even though the Ballad of Gay Tony is a stand-alone release (Available for download or purchasing on the Stories of Liberty City DVD) it is really meant to be played after churning through the campaign of either GTA IV itself or the Lost and the Damned, The reason being the fact that the opening missions really are a struggle for a beginner GTA IV player or a player who hasn’t played the game in a while.

The gameplay – like the first one – takes a while to get use to the clumsy cover system as well as Luis’ moving ability, for the first half an hour you’ll find yourself walking slowly and struggling to get around. The most critical problem has begun to show up, the A.I really isn’t cutting it anymore. You can happily throw a grenade between the feet of 2 enemies and they will do nothing but flinch as though a fly has just flew by. They only seem to react to you when you’ve stuck the barrel of your gun way up into their faces, it’s as though the A.I is on cocaine as well as the main characters!

Maybe a little too late? Well actually you will still get the same amazing GTA IV buzz out of the game but you know to expect that the game is getting old and that the market is changing.

“Going to shoot that guy right in the face, while listening to some European dance music, why not?”

Multiplayer – 6

Sadly the Multiplayer doesn’t really contend with the episodes brother (Lost and the Damned), with zero new game modes it’s hard to see any major improvements in the game’s multiplayer. You won’t find yourself being able to play The Lost and The Damned’s modes either as they are separate\exclusive to that game.

However, we would be lying if we said their were 0 changes to the multiplayer. They have just added 2 tweaks to already standard game modes:

In Free mode you can now go Base Jumping with your friends, nothing competitive though,  just general base jumping. This decision seems really odd seeing as in the trailer they released it clearly states info on it being fun and frantic (with people arm’d to the teeth with rockets and snipers! – sadly nothing). If you want to actually play a game of base jumping madness, or whatever you wish to call it, you need to actually be playing with a bunch of friends and making your own rules about how to play – a bit like being back in primary school during lunch time break. Massive let down.

The other change is the fact you can now use the N.O.O.S.E tank online in the GTA race mode as well as in free roaming, We also find that our primary car in GTA Race’s are being fitted with a nitro injection for super fast action! Excellent!

“Don’t mess with a guy who is holding a gun which clearly takes 2 hands to carry”

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Overall then

With the anticpated release of the Ballad of Gay Tony we found ourselfs asking for loads of content which we hadn’t been delivered digitally yet. Espcially with the huge sucess of The Lost and the Damned we expected an explosion of content. Even though we actually got an explosion, sadly it was an implosion. More content needed.