Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony

After the retail-sized, budget-priced Grand Theft Auto IV expansion The Lost and Damned put its biker boot to the face of every other piece of downloadable content this side of Shivering Isles, our expectations for its follow-up, The Ballad of Gay Tony, were set sky-high. Little did we know that our first hands-on time with it would literally take us sky-high in Liberty City.

Base jumping, parachuting out of high-flying aircraft, blowing up yachts with rocket-equipped helicopters — all of these activities are put front and center for Luis Fernando Lopez, the antihero of the new episode and bodyguard and business partner of Anthony “Gay Tony” Prince. Contrasted with the gritty, under-the-freeway gang-war dealings of Johnny Klebitz in The Lost and Damned, Lopez’s adventures show “the high life of Liberty City,” a Rockstar rep tells us, where the copters, yachts, and penthouses of the town’s upper (illicit) crust are the norm.

In essence, The Lost and the Damned is macho, while The Ballad of Gay Tony seems to lean more metro — not that there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, there’s a lot right with it.

The first mission we test-drove was called “Dropping In,” where we found ourselves hunting a Russian businessman who doesn’t want to sell the Liberty City Rampage hockey team to Tony’s business associate. But trying to fight your way up to the penthouse boardroom of his skyscraper would be suicide, so instead you’ll take the opposite but equally dangerous approach: dropping in from above.

Piloting a helicopter to a waypoint at the apex of the Liberty City atmosphere, we bailed out, plummeting through the sky for a few seconds before pulling our chute. The controls take just a few moments to adjust to: pull both triggers to “brake,” squeeze either trigger to turn, and move the left stick forward/back to shorten/ lengthen your latitudinal approach.

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