Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony

GTA IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony (TBOGT) is Rockstar’s love letter to all its fans who thought GTA IV was too serious, sober and boring. It’s totally outrageous and over-the-top in every way possible.

In TBOGT you play as Louis Lopez, a Dominican who’s just made it big in Liberty City thanks to his mentor and "business partner", Tony Prince AKA Gay Tony who’s one of Liberty City’s most successful club owners owning the town’s hottest gay and straight bar simultaneously.

Sadly his rep has been diminishing in recent times and business isn’t doing too well. To make matters worse Tony finds himself embroiled with all the wrong kinds of people and here’s where you, Louis, step in to save the day.


BOGT is all about Liberty City’s glamorous night life, fast cars, hot women, etc. Since you’re a business partner/bodyguard to a club owner you can visit any of Tony’s night clubs at any given point in time where you’re free to drink (in the form of a mini-game) or seduce the local women on the dance floor (a mini-game once again) with your smooth moves.

 Wooing a girl on the dance floor yields some highly favorable results. Missions structure overall in TBOGT is still the same but this time round they’ve been amped up tenfold.

 You’ll be doing some crazy stuff through the course of your 10 hour romp with the DLC that’ll make fans of San Andreas feel right at home. On the flip side there are a few highly annoying Buzzard missions. Luckily, they don’t reach GTA IV levels of frustration thanks to mid mission checkpoints implemented in TLAD.

New to the GTA IV universe are a bunch of mini games, the first of which is Fight Club where you enter an underground fighting ring to take on wave after wave of fighters until you land up in hospital or defeat all of them becoming reigning champion in the process. Next up is the much publicized base jumping that appears in various missions throughout the game’s plot.

Like all GTA games, character development is key to TBOGT. Gay Tony comes across as an annoying and whiny old wreck of his former self while Louis, his loyal lieutenant stands by him through thick and thin. Louis is more anti-hero than most video game protagonists but he must do what it takes to survive. Then there’s the totally awesome Yusif Amir, the coke snorting, gold loving Arab tycoon who wants to recreate Liberty City, voiced most excellently by British comedian, Omid Djalili.

Visually the game’s been touched up a bit and it looks a lot brighter and vibrant as compared to GTA IV that felt pretty brown. With all the frantic action, the frame rate tends to dip a bit but it never quite renders the game unplayable. It doesn’t hold a candle to some of the stuff we’ve seen in Uncharted 2 but it’s still a good looking game.

The bottom line is that TBOGT is an excellent addition to the GTA IV series. It packs in nearly 10 hours of gameplay, bringing in some real cool stuff to the table and offers players a diverse amount of activities in Liberty City. If you’re a fan of the GTA IV series, this DLC is a must have. Even if you didn’t particularly like GTA IV, I would still recommend giving this a shot since like I’ve mentioned before, BOGT feels like an ode to San Andreas which we all know can never be a bad thing.

Source:-www.rockstargames.com/theballadofgaytony/

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