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The second and final episode of Grand Theft Auto 4, The Ballad of Gay Tony, has been released, and with it, Rockstar closes the curtain for GTA 4 with a bang. The episode is being released exclusive on the Xbox 360, either as a standalone download, or as a part of the “Episodes of Liberty City” retail expansion pack, which also includes the previous episode, The Lost and Damned.

In The Ballad Of Gay Tony, you play as Luis Lopez, a nightclub manager and Tony Prince’s — aka. Gay Tony — business partner. Gay Tony, who’s gay in the most extravagant fashion, owns a few nightclubs and the biggest gay club in town, and when a deal goes bad, he sends you to recover some stolen diamonds — the same diamonds that were mentioned in GTA 4 and Lost and Damned — making you progress through mission by mission, GTA 4 style, on a hunt.

The missions in The Ballad Of Gay Tony are far more over the top than in GTA 4 and the previous episode, you’ll be shooting down helicopters from moving trains, blowing up a group of crooked cops and even helicopter dog fights — where your helicopter is made of gold. Yep, quite over the top. You’ll actually be blowing up plenty of stuff in the game, there’s far more action and large set pieces than in previous games, you’ll even get to drive an armored personnel carrier this time, with a sweet 20mm chain gun that obliterates everything in your path. On top of that, you gotta do your regular job, which is to manage clubs, and there’s even a mini-game where you can shake it on the dance floor, which, as you might expect, is pretty darn boring compared to the real missions.

However, there seems to be a lack of consistency with the missions, you’ll go from a few awesome high-octane missions to some that can be categorized as the most boring of both episodes. There are some good additions to the gameplay though, for instance, every time you complete a mission, you get a score, and when you’ve completed the game, you can go back and try to beat that score, which adds some replayability to the game — more than the previous editions. It’s also worth mentioning that the game includes a ton of content, missions and side missions, far more than one might expect from a DLC.

Technically, the game is up to par with the other GTA 4 games, and that means the visuals are beginning to showing their age. The character animations look dated and the visuals still feature low res textures and some popping here and there. The music and voice acting are top notch, GTA 4 quality as you might expect, and the game runs pretty smooth throughout. On the multiplayer side, there isn’t much addition, unfortunately, as this looks to be a very single-player focused episode. In conclusion, GTA 4: The Ballad of Gay Tony will most definitely satisfy GTA 4 fans, and you won’t be disappointed with the last installment in the series. Also, we finally get to know what happened to those darn diamonds.

The Good:
Lots of content
Great gameplay
Lots of action
Top notch voice acting and characters

The Bad:
Visuals are beginning to look dated
Some missions are very bad

Overall score: 8/10