Because of the lack of differences, this review is going to focus almost entirely on The Ballad of Gay Tony, the second expansion to the series. Aaron had already covered The Lost and the Damned for Gaming-Age with his review, and my opinion of the game doesn't really differ from his. Feel free to give it a read through here.

When you boot up the disc for the first time you're greeted with a pretty simple screen that lets you pick which expansion you want to play. There's no particular order that you need to pay attention to, and you can switch between the two whenever you want, so you don't need to finish one to play the other or anything silly like that. Since we're focusing on The Ballad of Gay Tony though, lets go ahead and pick that one on the right there.

TBOGT focuses on nightclub owner Tony Prince, a pretty successful and neurotic guy that runs two of the biggest nightclubs in town, Maisonette 9 and Hercules. His right hand man, body guard, and general business associate is Luis Lopez, a former bad boy that joined up with Prince after a stint in prison, and has now attempted to go straight, well, as straight as you can go in the world of GTA. Players take on the role of Lopez, as you attempt to keep Prince out of trouble, which isn't the easiest thing in the world to accomplish. As the game begins, we learn that things aren't particularly well for the nightclub business, as Tony has been forced to borrow some cash from a few unscrupulous types, mostly gangsters and other thugs, who now are looking for a little bit of reciprocation for their services. In an effort to climb out of debt, and keep his skin intact, Tony devises a few schemes with Lopez to try and get their money situation right, but everything dovetails after a heist goes wrong, and from there on out you're smack dab in the middle of a gigantic mess with not many options to get out of it.

As Luis, you'll run into a few familiar characters along the way, you'll see Niko, Roman, and Brucie, members of The Lost, and a couple other recognizable faces. Of course, there's a whole new cast of miscreants that follow, including self-styled "playboy" Yusif Amir, Brucie's older and far more arrogant brother, and the sadistic Russian gangster Bulgarin. The cast helps make the game, and one thing I found interesting about it this time out was that it felt a little more akin to older GTA titles, like something from Vice City or even GTA 3, where the characters were a little less serious and more like caricatures than some of the guys featured in GTA IV's main story. The dialogue and plot is great, but the individual cast members all seem a little over the top, outside of Lopez, and it's actually kind of fun to get back to a more comical style for the game than the somewhat serious tone of The Lost and the Damned. It's not all laughs, obviously, I think the friendship/boss angle between Tony Prince and Luis Lopez is handled really well, but there's little emotional struggle between anyone, which I suppose could be considered a bad thing depending on what you're looking for out of this release.

As far as main characters go, Luis Lopez does the job but feels a little flat and mundane compared to the world around him. To a certain degree I feel like that's intentional, he's an everyman character of sorts that people seem to respect due to his ties to Tony but also because he's apparently a great club manager and partner. However, he doesn't have a great deal of personality to go with that, his humor is pretty dry, and while we get to see little bits of his past in relation to his mother and friends, including where he grows up, I get the sense that we don't know him as well as we did Niko, or even Johnny. Like I mentioned, the best part about his character is how he handles his loyalty to Tony, there are numerous instances in the story were they really drive home that he owes Tony quite a bit, in the sense that he wouldn't be the man he is today if it wasn't for Prince helping him out when he needed it. It's the only charming side of him we get to see, when he's literally willing to knock Tony out to keep him from charging into a dangerous situation, and while he rarely gets worked up over some of the more dangerous things that occur in the game, we can tell that his primary interest is in protecting Tony and keeping his friend safe, even when Tony doesn't always seem to deserve that loyalty.

For the gameplay elements, you get a new thing introduced through Basejumping, which allows you to parachute off of buildings (and occasional aircraft), being used in both missions and a series of side events spread across Liberty City. It's a pretty fun element to be added, and certain missions make use of it in interesting ways, so it's certainly a welcome addition to the game. Besides that, Ballad also makes use of helicopters quite a bit, sometimes in conjunction with the whole parachuting thing, but more often than not as a stand-alone mission element. That said, I'm not particularly fond of the controls when it comes to shooting down things in a chopper, there are a couple missions that gave me serious headaches when it came to aiming and controlling, something that could easily be alleviated by allowing me to carry over some sort of auto target similar to the shooting mechanic in the game, or at least a noticeable reticule to help me line up my sights. As it stands, shooting at objects in the air and on the ground (or water) is more troublesome than it needs to be, and I dreaded missions that put me behind the pilot seat after a bit.

The other disappointing aspect of TBOGT comes from the multiplayer side of things, or lack thereof. You do have multiplayer present that you can bring up from the cell phone feature of the previous two entries. However, unlike the modes featured in the Lost, what you get here is pretty generic. There's simple Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch, Free Play, and finally GTA Races, which is the only real addition or new mode present. In GTA Races you can finally take potshots at people that are racing, meaning you can potentially kill someone during a race, which makes things far more interesting. Outside of that, there's nothing interesting to speak of. At least The Lost and the Damned tried to implement the whole Biker element into their multiplayer mode, but TBOGT has nothing that sets it apart from the standard stuff you'd see in GTA IV multiplayer to begin with, which is disappointing.

There are a number of side events and challenges to take on in TBOGT outside of the main story though. There's the basejumping events that I mentioned, plus the ability to run both of Tony's clubs through a series of mini-games, along with multi-tiered race events that have you jumping from a plane, parachuting to a boat, and then taking the race to a car for the finish. There are also drug wars to take on; a few new recreational things to check out, including new TV shows that are actually pretty entertaining. The overall amount of content in TBOGT easily rivals The Lost, and probably outdoes it in a direct comparison.

All together, The Ballad of Gay Tony is a great, final addition to the world of Grand Theft Auto IV, outside of a few annoyances and issues. The final package of Episodes from Liberty City is absolutely worth picking up if you've held off on the expansions up to this point, but don't be fooled into thinking you're getting anything noteworthy off of the disc in comparison to what the downloads offer. Either way though, both expansions are worth picking up, and they both manage to offer up fun and interesting side stories to Liberty City's mayhem.

Click Here to purchase Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City from Amazon.com