Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City Game Review
SoHood.com Reviewed by: Mario Diaz
Format: Xbox 360
Game Rating: 4.5/5.0
Rockstar Games has released a standalone disk version of their DLC games called Episodes from Liberty City, allowing gamers to play the stories without needing to have or put a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV into the Xbox 360 disk drive. The game focuses on the Lost & Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony, which are stories of Luis Lopez and Johnny Klebitz, both make the GTA a must have. I’ll focus more on the newer story, The Ballad of Gay Tony, cause obvious, it’s new game in the GTA series.
In The Ballad of Gay Tony, you take on the role of Luis Lopez who works for Tony Prince AKA “Gay Tony”. Tony is an owner of the biggest straight and gay nightclubs in Liberty City, he’s like a father figure to Luis, which he has also taken him under his wing and made him in something in his life. As Luis, you’ll not a guy trying to come up in the world as previous GTA titles, but as a guy trying to keep his world in order and stay legit, and kill anyone who threatens it by protecting Gay Tony.
New side mission and stuff to do, as the cage fighting and base-jumping. Both are fun in there own ways, as Base-jumping to great to parachute off high up off buildings or from moving helicopters. The fighting aspect is hand-to-hand combat, which really shows off how far GTA has come, from just the regular punch from the Vice City era, as you got a regular punch, block and more stronger punch, not that great compare to other games, but it’s a step in the right direction.
A great addition to both games is the inclusion of mid-mission checkpoints. We all been there, driving for more than a few minutes to a location only to die without finishing a mission, and then to replay the whole mission again, becoming very tedious. Now you can use your cell phone to replay any mission you’ve beating before and also if you happen to die in a mission and you made it past a checkpoint, you can continue where you left off, and try to finish the mission. Pretty handy and it very assessable, with all the over the top mission you’ll be ask to do, you bet your ass you’ll be wasting cellphone minutes.
The biggest dilemma I had was the driving, I don’t know why, but I can get use to these damn controls, the cars handed like a shopping cart, no smooth turns, GTA has gone with a more realistic driving system, but I miss the good old days, where driving in high speeds was a cake walk. Luckily, when available using a motorcycle seems to handle better, though it’s probably easier to move around tight places, around trucks, cars and overall with a motorcycle.
New weapons and cars are included as well as the tank, well it’s not the shell shooting type, just a machine gun shooting tank. The newer weapons are more explosive this time around, as sticky bombs and a more powerful shotgun are all at your disposal, making for some pretty big explosions.
You won’t be disappointed with Grand Theft Auto liberty stories; it finally cast a Spanish character as the main protagonist, Luis Lopez, who is of Dominican Republic decent, it’s undoubtedly a change of pace, as far a storyline goes. Unlike previous titles, Luis the main character isn’t as controversial as many would have thought, when the title of the game was announced. Yeah, there are a bunch of gay jokes aimed at Gay Tony, but none of them come out of Luis’s mouth, indicating that Luis has total respect for Tony, it just happen to be that Tony is gay, and Luis is fine with that. So you get this buddies lethal weapon like storyline that has both of them risking there lives for each other, making the whole experience that much more richer and interesting to continue to play to the finish.
About the Game:
Published by: Rockstar Games
Developed by: Rockstar North
Genre: Action
Release Date: US: October 29, 2009
MSRP: $39.99
