My least favorite out of three GTA IV campaigns, but I'm glad we have it.

The vibe is great, and although I prefer the atmosphere of the normal IV, it was cool to see Liberty City in different colors and perspective. Perfect for those who aren't into the dark tone of the main game. The missions and other activities are also more crazy and action packed, I loved the new triathlon races with parachutes, boats and cars with nitro.

The story fills the gaps and answers the questions of the other two storylines, but on its own kind of weak and forgettable. The characters and the dialogues are spot on as always tho.

If you wanted GTA IV to be more like V - that's just what you need.

The definitive way to experience Liberty City in the HD universe. Finally there is some variety to the missions, making extensive use of the helicopters that, while present in the previous adventures, had seen little use.

The characters and the plot are also more interesting and less generic, and the diamonds storyline feels less forced than in the case of TLAD.

If I come back to Liberty City HD in the future, this is the game I'll replay, no doubt about it.

Even more GTA IV. Throws you in to bombastic missions from the off and the pace never really lets up. Good variety and you can feel Rockstar really hitting their stride with this last DLC. You can see the origins of the three protagonist approach from GTA V here, with a number of missions and plotlines overlapping nicely between the three campaigns. They certainly feel their age, things have come a long way, especially in terms of current gen open world but I certainly had a good time going back to GTA IV.

I picked up this game on the recommendation of several friends that it was the best part of GTA4. The copy I got was the standalone pack of the two DLC's, so I checked out the first DLC, The Lost & The Damned, first and HATED it for the whole couple hours I spent with it. The Ballad of Gay Tony immediately hit me with a much better style and color palette and a more engaging story, but that wasn't exactly a high bar to clear. It took me a little under 10 hours to do just all the story stuff.

The Ballad of Gay Tony follows the escapades of the titular character "Gay" Tony as you play as his business partner/body guard Luis Lopez. Tony is an aging gay man who is going through a bit of a midlife crisis and has borrowed a ton of money from some really bad dudes to keep his clubs open and to fuel his drug habit, and the game consists of Luis going around and fulfilling obligations to these mafia-types to pay back Tony's debts as well as clean up his other related messes. The story is by far the best part of the game, as Luis and Tony not only have good chemistry, but they're also just fairly well written characters.

Tony is a bit of a stereotype, but not in a grating or obnoxious way as GTA so often loves to do. The rest of the main cast are certainly more on the line of obnoxious/offensive in how they're portrayed, but the game makes up for this in how well acted Luis is, as his straight-man (no pun intended) way of dealing with things is a consistently entertaining foil to the madcap cast of characters he has to deal with. The pacing of the story is all over the place, as characters are picked up for certain missions and then never spoken of or referenced again. Sure, you can hang out with your childhood friends and go to clubs or play air hockey together, but once you finish the couple missions with them and unlock the totally optional (thank god) "drug war" combat sections, you never engage with them again in the story, and the same goes for a decent number of the guys Tony owes money to.

The overall narrative is carried heavily by the likability of its characters, and if you hate the characters (which I honestly wouldn't blame anyone for in a GTA game), this game is likely gonna be a really miserable slog. The world of GTA 4, with all of its "satire" of American pop-culture is honestly as grating and not funny as ever. The radio stations in the cars have good music, but are so often interrupted by such miserably annoying fake advertisements I often found myself listening to songs I didn't even like just so I could get off of stations that were playing ads. This is an element that also really adds to that aforementioned "miserable slog".

Anything that isn't the story is a flat-out negative in this game. GTA 4 may've been popular at the time, but MY GOODNESS has it aged poorly. Even without the beige filter that The Lost & The Damned put over everything, this is still a really ugly game. The cutscenes look pretty good still, but that doesn't make up for all the texture pop-in and ugly textures the actual game is FILLED with. It also runs pretty badly on a 360, with the framerate pretty consistently diving into areas where it begins to affect gameplay as well as the lack of RAM on the console consistently leading to super annoying crap like cops spawning literally just out of your line of sight so outrunning them takes FOREVER. The other side of this also means that some NPC's who I'd need to start a side-quest or even just buy a hotdog to heal myself occasionally just wouldn't spawn, so I'd need to just look around or leave and come back so they'd finally spawn in.

The driving isn't great, but it isn't bad. It was certainly annoying enough that I hated doing any races in the game because if you hit a bump on the curb (or a piece of scenery trash) you FLY into the air like you're made of cardboard. However, the REAL sticking point for why this game is so consistently not fun to play is it's main meat of most missions: the combat. This game has an insane amount of shooting in it for a game where the shooting is so god damn bad.

First of all, you don't have a weapon wheel. You just tab between weapons by hitting right and left on the D-pad. You can also only hold one type of each weapons (how many types there are is unclear, as you only cycle through them and gun stats aren't a thing visible to the player in any way), they aren't upgrade-able, and a lot of the better guns you get through missions aren't actually sold in stores and therefore buying ammo for them is impossible (yet they DO sell RPG launchers in stores, so whatever). The basic task of gun maintenance and even knowing which guns are better than others is needlessly obscured and cluttered.

Secondly, combat in missions is made even more frustrating by the fact that your enemy radar is terrible. Very very frequently, if your current mission objective doesn't involve killing enemies, you won't even be shown enemies on your radar, just the interaction points you're trying to tick off to get through the mission. So some missions you have an ability to plan around more than what you can see, and others you can't. It's entirely arbitrary, and makes the awkward system that is actual gunplay even more of a pain to deal with.

Lastly, and most importantly, is the aiming and shooting. Aiming is done in a very confusing system that the game takes far to long to try to adequately explain to you in any detail (there is a controls menu you can look at at the pause menu, but there are three different control sets, and the labels for what each button does blink between different types of situational actions ever couple seconds, making it an absurdly difficult menu to read. I literally never figured out how to aim and fire weapons while driving, let alone change weapons while driving). You hold LT to lock onto an enemy within your line of sight with the gun you currently have out. If you wanna free aim, you gotta half-hold LT, or take out the guy you're currently looking at. If you're in cover (which is different from just crouching), sometimes you can fire multiple times at what you're aiming at with the auto-aim, and sometimes you can't. It's very circumstantial and I never figured out the nuances behind it.

I have to stress that the most horrible part is really the aiming itself, especially in cover. I turned the aiming sensitivity all the way up, and the speed at which the character aims the guns was just never consistent and always jittering all over the place (especially when in cover), making hitting anything not auto-aimed THAT much more of a pain in the ass. Add this all to how you can die really quickly, and really the only thing I can say that's any good about the combat-packed mission design is that at least the load times are mercifully quick.

Verdict: Not Recommended. GTA 4 is a game whose systems have aged very badly. Saints Row 1, for all it copies from GTA's style, improves on its mechanics to such a high degree that I find it retroactively staggering that a game I thought was so mechanically flawed was so superior to this game. Don't even get me started about Saints Row 2, which just blows absolutely everything about this game out of the water. If you really want a "drive around and cause mayhem" game on your 360, Saints Row 2 is just about as cheap as any GTA 4 stuff, and is a far superior (and enjoyable) play experience than GTA 4, Gay Tony-version or otherwise. Unless you just HAVE to see the story, I would stay far, far away from this historical building block for the open world-city genre.