Like The Lost and Damned before it, The Ballad of Gay Tony takes place concurrently with the events of GTAIV, this time focusing on Luis Lopez and his business partner Tony Prince, known better within the criminal community as Gay Tony, though that's far and away the kindest name he's given. Together Lopez and Prince run a pair of high-end nightclubs in Liberty City, but a slumping economy and the maturation of LC's gay community are putting a cramp on Tony's non-stop bacchanalia of coke and pills, and the pair end up owing money to the wrong people. Despite being an ex-con and an unrepentant murderer, Luis is definitely the more reasonable and responsible of the two, and playing as Luis, it's your job to sort things out--and of course, by “sort things out,” I mean rob, blow shit up, and kill a whole mess of dudes.
While the story is ostensibly about the dynamic between Tony and Luis, it also weaves in and out of the events of Grand Theft Auto IV, and the game is packed with callbacks and cameos, moreso than Lost and Damned. There are a few gems in there, but there's also a lot of forced coincidence, and at a point, it can be difficult to keep track of the extended cast of GTAIV. The Ballad of Gay Tony loosely revolves around Liberty City's nightclub lifestyle, but there's no specificity to the criminal experience being portrayed here, and it ends up feeling like a weak caricature of a good Grand Theft Auto game. Story threads about Luis' past, his relationship with his mother, and his dodgy reputation as a ladies' man are hinted at but go nowhere, and many of the colorful supporting characters are overly reminiscent of existing GTAIV characters, to the point that they actually introduce Brucie's older (but not bigger) brother Mori, whose amped-up alpha behavior simply doesn't pay the same dividends it did the first time around.
Alongside the digital release of The Ballad of Gay Tony, Rockstar is putting out Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City, which bundles both Gay Tony and The Lost and Damned onto one disc. This seems intended for players wary of or unconvinced by downloadable content, but the real value here is that you can expect market forces to push down the price of the disc much more quickly than its Microsoft-controlled digital counterparts. Considering the standalone nature of both episodes, I suppose it makes as much sense to load up that disc as the GTAIV disc to access the content.
Time and expectations have taken a certain toll on Grand Theft Auto IV, but all that aside, the bottom line for The Ballad of Gay Tony is that it's just not as good as the GTAIV experiences that preceded it. It feels like Rockstar has run out of tricks, and it has got its work cut out for it with whatever comes next for Grand Theft Auto.
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