Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony

Luis Fernando Lopez has escaped from a life of drug-dealing to gain respectable work as a bar manager for Anthony 'Gay Tony' Prince, one of the most famous club-owners in Liberty City. However, Gay Tony's business is not going to plan and he has been forced into some shady deals to keep things afloat. Lopez's skills are called into use to help Tony survive a brewing crime war...and resolve the mystery of some missing diamonds.

The Ballad of Gay Tony is the second of two self-contained expansions to Grand Theft Auto IV and - as of this time of writing - is the most recent entry in the Grand Theft Auto franchise. As with The Lost and the Damned before it, The Ballad of Gay Tony pursues its own storyline whilst also being a supporting part of the storyline of GTA4. Several missions cross-over with the events of both GTA4 and The Lost of the Damned, so players will finally get the full story to what's been going on in all three titles.

As is standard in the GTA franchise, the game casts you in the role of a guy of dubious morality who must fulfil a series of missions to complete the game. These missions are given to you by various characters, some of whom you help willingly and others more reluctantly. Between missions you can chill out, drive around the city, watch a bit of TV or engage in social activities such as playing golf. Later in the game other activities are unlocked, such as base-jumping from buildings or engaging in multi-vehicle races. You also interact with other characters through your mobile phone, from being able to call in favours (such as having cars or weapons dropped off at your location) to socialising with them in bars or clubs. However, unlike GTA4 where it famously got rather annoying after a while, characters rarely call you to ask you to hang out.

The meat of the game, as always, lies in the missions. Tony has gotten himself into debt with several gangsters, and to help pay them off Luis has to do various jobs with them. In several cases this backfires badly, but Luis does make one genuine friend in the form of the ludicrously OTT Yusuf Amir (voiced with ridiculous enthusiasm by comedian Omid Djalili), the son of a multi-billionaire with a curious predilection for stealing unobtainable vehicles (a tank, a combat helicopter and a subway car, which he plans to turn into a submarine). As the game continues, the self-contained narrative with Luis trying to save Tony's business entwines with the story of the previous games, with the fate of the famous diamonds finally being revealed.

The Ballad of Gay Tony is great fun. After the previous two games were criticised for being, by normal GTA standards, po-faced and restrained, The Ballad of Gay Tony brings back the crazy. The game features missions involving shooting up the harbour with a helicopter and throwing a nasty blogger out of an aircraft and then base-jumping to rescue him before he hits the ground (I guess some of those critical GTA4 reviews hurt Rockstar's feelings). Those who've missed the series' more demented sense of humour will likely welcome the lighter, funnier approach to this game.

Unfortunately, despite being a bit lighter than previous entries to the series, the game is not as successful as The Lost and the Damned in integrating the optional between-missions stuff with the main game storyline. In The Lost and the Damned the gang wars and bike races linked in with the central narrative, but in The Ballad of Gay Tony there is a bit of a disconnect between the base-jumping and multi-vehicle races and the main storyline. More connected are optional sequences where Luis has to manage the club overnight, but these get rather dull and repetitive quite quickly.

As a result, The Ballad of Gay Tony is dependent on its missions to succeed and they are pretty decent, with some great voice acting. The game's biggest success is developing a genuinely warm relationship between Luis - a heterosexual Dominican-American - and the gay Anthony Prince without descending into the cliches the Grand Theft Auto franchise gleefully normally employs. This relationship is explored in some depth and is surprisingly effective. This is in stark contrast to the game's failure to employ any female characters of note in the game, which is a bit more inexplicable.

The Ballad of Gay Tony (***½) is a fun game with some unexpectedly good development of character and relationships. The missions are entertaining, although the optional game elements are a bit less successful this time around. Overall, however, it sees out the Grand Theft Auto IV era in style. The game is available now in a collected package with GTA4 and The Lost and the Damned on PC (UK, USA), X-Box 360 (UK, USA) and PlayStation 3 (UK, USA). Grand Theft Auto V will be released in mid-2013.

Grand Theft Auto: The Lost and the Damned

Johnny Klebitz is the vice-president of the Lost, a Liberty City motorbike gang. He's in charge because the club president, Billy Grey, has been in jail on drug charges. Unfortunately, when Billy is released he is quick to assert his leadership, reigniting a gang war with the rival Angels of Death and breaking a truce which Johnny had worked hard to create. As Billy gets out of control, Johnny reluctantly follows his orders and undertakes a life of crime and chaos in the city...until the opportunity to take part in a diamond heist results in a sequence of events that will rock the whole city to its core.

The Lost and the Damned is a self-contained expansion pack to Grand Theft Auto IV. It builds on the setting and events of GTA4, though it's a game in its own right which does not require the original to run. However, the storyline of The Lost and the Damned entwines around that of GTA4, and foreknowledge of GTA4 definitely improves the playing experience.

At first glance, The Lost and the Damned is GTA as normal. You control a morally dubious central character and are given free reign of a huge city in which various tasks can be performed. Most of these tasks revolve around a developing storyline, with missions building on one another to form one long narrative. However, there is nothing to stop you from just cruising around the massive city listening to the radio if you wish. There are also bonus and side-objectives that can be accomplished. In The Lost and the Damned these optional missions enhance the storyline. The Lost are at war with the Angels of Death through most of the game, and at almost any point you can attend a flashpoint where your fellow gang members and a bunch of Angels will face off in combat. This can lead to running gun battles on foot, bike duels or car chases. The other major optional task is taking part in bike races. To ensure the Lost's reputation as daredevil motorbike riders is kept intact, Johnny has to race other bikers and uphold the Lost's street cred. Because these tasks are thematically in keeping with the main game plot, it gives The Lost and the Damned a more cohesive feel than other GTA games, where the optional missions and tasks are sometimes just random bits of mayhem with no connection to the rest of the game.

The game's central storyline is, as is normally the case with Rockstar, well-written and darkly humourous, although not immune to gangster/crime cliches. As normal, Rockstar cheerfully have no hang-ups about swearing, violence or drug-use and, for the first time in the series, resort to shots of full frontal nudity during one cut scene. However, possibly out of a sense of flipping the bird at their critics, this is of a male character and only comes at the end of a lengthy sequence in which the character's nudity has cheesily been hidden by scenery. Whilst not exactly the height of sophisticated comedy (a few other meta-fictional nods in the game at gang cliches or gaming conventions are more amusing), it's a wry nod at the frequent and vocal critics of the series.

The game encourages a degree of roleplaying: Johnny is a biker and is vocally unhappy behind the wheels of a car. This encourages the player to use his bike wherever possible. This is helped by the fact that The Lost and the Damned improves motorcycle handling and physics a lot over the over-sensitive bikes of GTA4 itself. Johnny can stay on his bike through collisions that would have sent Niko flying fifty feet through the air. There are also new mechanics for driving in formation with your gang, calling gangmembers for backup in the middle of firefights (this can be done even in the middle of story missions) and 'levelling up' your gangmates by helping them survive missions. Unfortunately, this latter mechanic is broken by the game's variable AI, which often has your gang-members charging head first into hails of gunfire from prepared enemy positions rather than seeking cover. Still, it's a nice idea and helps differentiate the game in tone and feel from GTA4.

The game takes place mostly on the other side of Liberty from where you started GTA4, and for the most part does a good job of exploring under-used parts of the city from that game. The game also has the entire city open to explore from the start (resulting in a minor continuity error, as early missions take place simultaneously with the opening of GTA4, when the bridges were still closed due to a terrorist threat). There's a general feeling of the game taking the training wheels off and letting you get on with what you want to get on with, moreso than GTA4 itself. You can still play darts or go bowling (or indulge in new activities, such as arm-wrestling your biker buddies), but mercifully no-one rings you up incessantly demanding that you hang out with them. One disappointment is that the racing and gang war sub-games don't play any major impact on the narrative. Given that these optional elements are an opportunity for you to prove your worthiness as a gang leader, it's a shame these elements are not reflected in the storyline (where one plot twist revolves around your trustworthiness and ability to lead coming into question).

Another problem is that The Lost and the Damned is a stand-alone title, but it's plot is somewhat obtuse if you have not played GTA4 ahead of time. There's a whole raft of storyline elements in the game that go nowhere and have no resolution (as they merely highlight events in GTA4 rather than in this game). As a traditional expansion pack (that would require the original game to play) servicing the original game this would make sense, but as a stand-alone story, The Lost and the Damned feels partially incomplete. Its own core narrative - Johnny's relationship with the Lost - does have a definitive arc and conclusion, however, and the game deserves plaudits for going with a remarkably bleak and bitter ending, almost as dark as GTA4's.

The Lost and the Damned (****) is a game that is a lot of fun. It's shorter and more concise than GTA4 itself and benefits from its greater focus and side-objectives that make much more sense within the context of the game. The missions are varied and the traditional black humour stops the game from becoming too po-faced. However, its storyline relies too heavily on GTA4's and it maintains the original game's issue of downplaying the wackiness of earlier GTA games in favour of sometimes dry (though well-acted) character drama. The game is available now in a collected package with GTA4 and The Ballard of Gay Tony on PC (UK, USA), X-Box 360 (UK, USA) and PlayStation 3 (UK, USA).

Grand Theft Auto IV

Niko Bellic is a veteran of war and ethnic strife in the Balkans. Tiring of a life of violence and brutality, he receives an invitation to move to Liberty City, where his brother Roman reports he has made a new life for himself involving fast cars and beautiful women. Moving to the States, Niko finds his brother's stories were exaggerated. He runs a cab firm and is in debt up to his eyeballs with various shady characters. Proving his usefulness in eliminating opponents, Niko finds various factions in Liberty City vying to employ his talents and his new life in a new country becomes even more violent than the one he left behind.


Grand Theft Auto IV was released in 2008 and at the time of its release was reportedly the biggest-budgeted game of all time (a record later lost to The Old Republic) and the fastest-selling (since outstripped by Modern Warfare 2 and 3). Despite the title, it was the sixth 'main' game in the Grand Theft Auto series and the first in the series to appear on current-generation hardware, featuring massive advances in graphics over the previous games in the series. It was greeted with near-unanimous critical acclaim but fan reaction was more mixed, with criticisms over the toning down of the wackiness of the series and the reduction in game size and character customisation from the colossal San Andreas.

In general terms, the game plays in an identical manner to Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City and San Andreas. Your character has the freedom to pick from one of several missions from one of several characters at a time, or can go off and do odd jobs for money or can simply chill out and explore the city. Given the leap to the next generation of hardware, it's surprising how similar the gameplay is to the previous titles in series. Of course, graphically the game is a massive leap forwards in quality and players will likely spend early parts of the game simply gawping at the sun rising over the ocean, or the monumental size of the city and its dozens of skyscrapers when seen from a helicopter. On PC, adding a graphics mod (like the mighty IceEnhancer mod, if your PC can handle it without instantly exploding) can make the game even look semi-photorealistic and absolutely jaw-dropping. Liberty City's fidelity to the real New York City is also startling: one of my NYC-based friends reported even finding his apartment building in the game, let alone faithful renditions of the Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, MetLife Building, Grand Central Station and the Chrysler Building.

GTA4 with the IceEnhancer mod. If your PC has a modern graphics card and is cooled by liquid nitrogen, your game can look like this.

A noticeable addition to the game is a cellphone, through which your character can receive missions and call up contacts. The cellphone (which also doubles as a camera and MP3 player) is a handy addition to the gameplay and provides the game with its biggest single step forwards over previous titles in the series: the ability to interact with other characters. In previous games, you could only interact with characters in missions and cut-scenes, and had no say over how your relationship with these people developed. In GTA4, you can ring up contacts and arrange to meet them outside of missions for drinks or going to shows or playing games. This improves your relationship with these characters, and at a certain point you can call on them for resources or favours. Additional depths to these characters are also revealed in conversations that take place during these meetings. The game essentially gives you some control over how interpersonal relationships develop during the story, which is fairly remarkable for a non-RPG.

Unfortunately, a potentially paradigm-shifting mechanic bogs down into a minor annoyance when, whilst clinging to the roof of a truckfull of heroin with the driver trying to shake you off to your imminent death, you get a phone call from a friend asking you to play darts with him. When you say no because you are about to die in the face, they get the huff and your reputation points with the character go down. By the late-game period, when you have more than half a dozen friends and contacts, the calls and texts begging for you to hang out with them become a constant stream of annoyance, and this results in them being ignored by most players. Fortunately they are purely optional.

The meat of the game, then, is the plot and the missions, and both are well-executed. The storyline is excellent, probably the best in the entire series, and is depicted through convincing writing and strong voice acting. Niko's character development is great, as he tries to be a good person but all too easily is dragged back to a life of violence and crime. This is Rockstar's latest attempt to present a three-dimensional protagonist who is realistic and complex but must also be capable of committing whatever mayhem the player wants him to and is their best attempt yet (Vercetti in Vice City being an unredeemable villain and CJ in San Andreas being too nice, conflicting frequently with the player's lunatic actions). Other characters are also excellently developed, with Niko's brother Roman and Jamaican friend Jacob being notable. For a game with an ethnically diverse cast (the game has lots of satirical commentary on American immigration issues), however, it is disappointing that the game's only gay character of note being presented as a mincing, effeminate cliche, although his role as Niko's conscience in several missions is important.

A rare quiet moment in the game, with the insane ultraviolent mayhem on hold.

The missions are great, ranging from assassinations to massive all-out battles to car chases to helicopter duels amongst the skyscrapers of the city. Towards the end of the game (the single-player missions will take about 25 hours to complete) things start getting a tad repetitive, but generally speaking the missions are varied and fun. Combat has been given a big overhaul, with the addition of cover mechanics. However, enemy AI appears to almost be unchanged from previous games in the series, with them being worse shots than Imperial Stormtroopers, and rarely challenging. Car handling has also been made more realistic, with the cars being heavier and more difficult to stop (aside from the best sports cars). This makes the choice of which car to take on a mission far more important than previously. The game's handling of police pursuits has also been made more realistic, with it being possible to escape the police's attention by getting out of a search zone and lying low. However, it's also much easier than before, and the police are much less of a threat than in previous games.

Where the game succeeds is in its depiction of a modern city riven by competing interests (corporate, government and criminal) and its portrayal of Niko as a bewildered individual caught in the middle of it all. The game is a lot of fun, if not quite as insane as the previous instalments of the series, with occasionally effective musings on the nature of violence and its eroding effect on the soul. The game is also heavily satirical, passing commentary on the USA and the issues it faces on many levels (the war on terror, corporate power, the economy, immigration, civil rights) through dialogue and also the game's numerous, entertaining radio stations (and yes, Lazlow returns to Liberty City with a new show).

Overall, Grand Theft Auto IV (****½) is an impressive, engrossing game. It lacks the tonal variety that the different cities and cultures of San Andreas brought to proceedings, but it has more depth of character and a stronger plot than any previous GTA game. It's also a tragedy, a rather startling choice for Rockstar and a genuine risk for them to take with one of the biggest gaming franchises in the world. Artistically, it pays off handsomely. The game is available in a collected package with its two spin-off episodes, The Lost and the Damned and The Ballard of Gay Tony, on PC (UK, USA), X-Box 360 (UK, USA) and PlayStation 3 (UK, USA).