The Ballad of Gay Tony is also the episode which will bring the entirety of GTA IV to its conclusion. It's been an exhaustive tour through Rockstar's eternal city, kicking off so long ago in the gloom of night with Nico's low-key arrival. It seems only fitting that the whole thing's going to end, a million miles away in terms of tone, with a cheery kind of chaos, bidding adieu in a freewheeling muddle of speedboats, fireballs and hair's-breadth base-jump landings. The most persistent criticism levelled at the developer's urban juggernaut over the past few years has been that, as the company grows as a storyteller, its games lose that sense of hedonistic fun. In this final chapter, then, Rockstar seems to be trying to prove that it can handle the highs as well as the lows - that just because it's learnt to craft characters you'll truly care about, it hasn't forgotten that players also like to donut a bus into a funfair every now and then. That's a challenge, to be sure, but if the first handful of missions are anything to go by, like Lopez drifting down out of the clouds for a perfect landing in the middle of a penthouse helipad, the team seems to be right on target.
