With The Ballad of Gay Tony completed, I have now completed the entire GTA 4 series. With Gay Tony, I wasn't exactly sure what to expect based on the title, and I didn't do any research into the game before I played it. When I started, I felt like the game took one step back and two steps forward.
I enjoyed the fact that this game expanded the city and interactions with the other characters, my favourite new part of the game were the inclusion of many new weapons to purchase. I loved all of the new guns, in fact I didn't use any guns from the vanilla GTA or from any of the gun vendors; I loved the sticky bombs, they were much easier to use and much more dependable than those stupid pipe bombs, same with grenades.
I didn't enjoy some aspects which I loved a lot in The Lost and the Damned however, I only did one gang war and it wasn't even that fun, so I never did any of the others. The Base Jumping was too hard to land as perfect as the game was expecting, so I gave up on those near immediately. The other part about the game I disliked was that I couldn't get two achievements because I was expected to get my "Completed Percentage" up to 80% for each mission, then 100%. Now it's not easy to get yourself past 30% with some of those, you' can be getting attacked by 50 dudes and they want 20 headshots, 70% accuracy, 10% damage to your car, and only taking 15% damage yourself; do they think we're Rambo here?
Most of the missions were also extremely predictable, when starting a mission you can automatically assume that you have to fly a helicopter at some point, and when in the helicopter you know that you are assumed to either chase someone, land it (lol fuckin impossible), or jump out of it with a parachute... good times. The missions didn't even seem that unique, to me it just seemed like we were tying loose ends with the main GTA 4 story.
The game is still recommended, but I would suggest playing this one before you play The Lost and the Damned. To me, that game was more enjoyable and it really made you love all of the characters you interacted with. About the only new character I liked in The Ballad of Gay Tony was Yusef, the Saudi Arabian rich dude, he was funny as shit and always made the dialogue awesome when he was in a scene.
