From its rainbow-hued, disco-dancing premise to a host of new features, stories, cars, guns, mini-games and characters, Rockstar have outdone themselves in this the newest, and final addition to the Grand Theft Auto IV series. It is very much its own story, with its own style, but just like previous add-on The Lost and the Damned, there are subtle elements of narrative crossover with the main game. You  feel like you’re in the same Liberty City – you’re just hanging out with a different crowd.

 

Algonquin nightclub tycoon Tony Prince, after making some suspect transactions, has landed himself in a serious amount of debt, and as one of his right hand men – Luis Lopez - you’re in deep too. But working for a tycoon, the company you keep is of a different kind to that of GTA IV’s previous characters. Working for, against, and alongside the highest criminal echelons of Liberty City – you can expect very different kinds of missions, and a new collection of weapons more suited to those with access to substantial amounts of cash. Gold-plated SMG anyone? No? Heavy duty special-forces style machine guns? Explosive ammunition? It’s a compelling and highly playable shift in setting.

 

In keeping with this atmosphere of this glitterballs, mass-destruction and criminally-super-rich-laissez-fare-abandon, the missions you’ll find yourself carrying out are more spectacular, more cinematic and more downright insane than anything you’ll have seen in previous games. Closer in some ways to the crazier exploits you’ll have undergone in GTA San Andreas – in TBOGT you’ll find yourself parachuting out of skyscrapers into moving vehicles; running along the tops of subway trains shooting down helicopters before being airlifted clean off the tracks; and robbing experimental military aircraft from the backs of luxury yachts before chasing down speedboats. All to serve the ends of businessmen with more money and ambition than sense. How noble of you.

 

Some features you’ll have seen and loved in previous games that were absent from GTA IV have been brought back with a vengeance in this latest installment. The base-jumping you saw in GTA San Andreas is back, meaning you can now leap from Liberty City’s array of impressive skyscrapers and live to tell the tale. Rockstar have also brought in a replay-mission function, letting you go back and redo missions you’ve completed, after you finish the game, and get them done exactly right for your 100% completion list. Beyond these, Rockstar are keeping their cards close to their chest on exactly what else we can expect to see. But having seen this much, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be spectacular.

 

--Martin Dean