When GTA IV dropped, a LOT of console gamers jumped on it as a reason console was better then PC. After all, you couldn’t play the dream-game of GTA on PC, could you? And while I would never argue a single game makes a platform better or worse then another (even if it can make a platform worth having), a lot of PC gamers were looking forward to playing it on their chosen device.
I was not one of them.
However, I did finally get that interest when an expansion the Lost and Damned trailers hit TV, but I did not count on being able to ever get ahold of it where I could play with camera aiming the way I want and demand, so I let it go… until this collection made it’s way to steam. I didn’t care enough to grab it immediately, but when a summer sale dropped, I picked it up. And then recently, it made the selection, so I checked out the trailers and thought “why the hell not?” I found out why not… and then the game showed me.
Now before we begin, this is a combination review. Since you could not install or run these games apart from each other, but had to run them from a single program, I decided it was best to treat them as one game. But in doing so, I have also split them up so clicking either name below will bring you directly to that game. Also, to be up front, I did not finish The Ballad of Gay Tony. You will find why as you read.
Story: This day has been a long time coming. Johnny has been doing his best to handle the Lost biker club in his absence, but the club president Billy is finally get out of rehab! After a joyous reunion and a ride home to the clubhouse, Billy gets to settling in at home. But he is not without a few simple demands. Despite rehab, he is looking for his booze, his drugs, and his bike. The first two the gang can offer without issue. But his bike, they need to go get.
Unfortunately for the city and especially for the poor sap who sold it, they find out a rival gang called the Angels of Death currently possess it. This insult instigates Billy to teach the AoD a lesson and before long things escalate to a full on biker gang war across the streets of Liberty City! As things and Billy spiral completely out of control, Johnny, as well as the rest of the Lost, will be tested to their limits, in skill, survival, and old fashioned loyalty to the club and their biker-brothers.
Unfortunately, this story seems come off the rails about half-way through. During one of the missions, one of the few major plot event occurs which leaves Billy unable to lead the gang and Johnny once again taking over… and you spend most of the second half doing fairly random missions for random people while the plot of the game goes into hibernation until the big finale. Outside of some fan-service to tie Johnny into events of the original Grand Theft Auto 4, they really add nothing to the picture. And that finale really seems designed to do nothing but clinically tie all the loose ends and say “we’re done.” The end result to this is a great start, but the story being told just loses it’s way.
5/10
Graphics: It seems that The Lost and Damned is a fairly mixed bag when it comes to looks. On the one hand, when this game is at it’s best, it looks absolutely gorgeous. The landscape flows effortlessly as you ride the streets of the entire Liberty City map with tons of character lovingly drenching the buildings, streets, and tunnels that it contains. If while riding the highways during an empty moment you stopped paying attention to the road to admire just how well this whole picture comes together, there isn’t a soul in the world that would blame you.
But it’s in looking at those details that where you see the cracks. It is not uncommon to see signs on buildings fight with the wall behind it to decide what should be displayed, ruining the visage for just a second. And many things on the street have a fairly small draw-distance, making them obvious when they show up much later then you should be able to see them. And speaking of draw distance, the cars also suffer this as they can sometimes be pretty close by when they become nice looking cars and not just blocky models at times.
People, on the other hand, seem a lot more “middle of the road.” They look pretty good overall. There is no way you would ever think they look real, but especially considering the age of the game, it’s amazing how much detail they got in, right down to the expressions. Add to this some descent animation and the world looks right when you get really close to it.
7/10
Sound: Rockstar went out of their way to make sure the music was top-notch in this title. And this was with good reason: most of it is in the radio stations you will be able to choose from while driving/riding around Liberty City. Everything from 80s synth music to death metal, there is a very solid selection available in the game for any given music taste that you might want to play! Absolutely astounding job, and that’s before we get to the absolutely hysterical ads dispersed through all of it. Simply put the radio is an absolute joy.
Not that the voice acting doesn’t hold it’s own either. In fact, this often carries the cutscenes very well and with random chatter while the gang rides around letting a more humorous part of the brotherhood show itself as they rag on each other in that spirit. In either case, they sound pretty good and work as a key way to build the world’s feel and activity as you move through the story.
The only relatively weak point in the audio of the game is the sound effects. But this is strictly on a relative scale because the voice acting and music is that good. The most common sounds you will hear are the throaty motor of your bike and the much more standard for combat sounds of the various guns you will use. This last part is the only real downside of how this game sounds, but that’s more because unlike the rest, it just fails to stand out as anything more then “I expect this” levels of quality. And when that’s the worst you can say about a single element in the entire audio of the a game, then well done!
9/10
Gameplay: The Lost and Damned was made as an expansion to Grand Theft Auto IV, and as such carries a lot of the same traits. You will play Johnny, vice-president of the biker club the Lost in a 3rd person adventure through the same Liberty City as the original title. You will murder, cheat, steal, and destroy various things as the many missions require, all the while having to escape the cops. Unlike most games, you are not the good guy. You are not even the “ok guy stuck in a bad place.” You might be the BETTER guy in many cases, but you are another criminal in a city full of them.
But how you play is the very definition of “open world.” You will spend a lot of your time in vehicles either traveling to different missions, races, gang wars, or various other useful locations… or just raising hell because you can between all these events. This is both a good and a bad thing, as the game offers you a LOT of freedom on where you can go, but vehicles can be a royal pain to get used to. Simply put, vehicles feel like ass in this game. Cars are clunky as hell to drive, and it doesn’t help that your look controls are completely independent, meaning you will be constantly adjusting this while driving around.
Thankfully the bikes are easier to work with. They are smaller, faster, able to turn tighter and what you will be using for most of the game. However, they are still not nearly as easy to ride as vehicles in most other games, so even this will take some getting used to. And you will continue to use them during missions to get where you need to and sometimes in combat or escape directly!
Combat in these adds to the complication of not being able to look where you are driving cause you need to aim the camera to fire at whoever you need to shoot at, but in this case it isn’t a bad thing. It is clunky, but it feels naturally so as you are fighting from high-speed vehicles against others in high speed vehicles, and it’s actually satisfying to get better at this aspect of the game.
Sadly, I can not say the same about being on foot in any way, shape, or form. You have an animation for turning, which looks good, but means walking around has a turning radius, making it awkward to wander inside the smaller halls of just about any building. When you are outside, you have room so this isn’t as big a problem, but the outside world is also huge making a noticeably slow walking speed inside absolutely INSUFFERABLE the few times you need to outside. You can run, which helps, but Johnny has stamina and will huff-and-puff and slow to a walk if you go too long.
And finally, combat on foot is the absolute low-point. Almost every fight on foot boils down to taking cover behind an object, pulling out a rapid fire weapon and headshotting the enemy in a target-range-like setup until they are all gone. At which point depending on the mission, you either rinse and repeat, get on your bikes and chase after someone leaving, or get scarce yourself. It is exceptionally easy and there is no real challenge in any of these portions of the game, especially as the enemy basically refuses to move once they pick a spot, meaning you never have to either.
But that may be for the best as the game tries to take the cover you use into account for how you are allowed to look around the room, and this can fail spectacularly, requiring you to leave cover unnecessarily in order to even be able to shoot your opponents from time to time.
6/10
Story: You play as Luis, business partner of the infamous “Gay Tony” and co-manager of the two hottest clubs in all of Liberty City. As such, you would think you had it made and life was going great, and this is definitely the image you and your partner want to pass out to the world, but under the surface, things are not so good. Tony, it turns out, has made some major mistakes in his work managing the financial side of this enterprise. As a result, he now owes some very bad people a lot of money, and as his business partner, so do you.
And with this beginning you will begin your quest to clear the debts of you and your business partner, doing your debtor’s dirty work to do it, as well as looking into new people to partner with in the process. This will take the story in many different but connected ways, some funny, some serious, some just plain messed up, but unlike the first expansion in the pack, the story here remains a lot more cohesive through all the GTA-style chaos it rolls through.
In fact, it does so remarkably well. While it starts with a little less direction then you would expect, it follows it’s themes perfectly, and comes to an absolutely perfect conclusion. Rockstar did a FAR better job here then The Lost and Damned.
8/10
Graphics: Graphically this game has about the same quality as The Lost and Damned, which makes sense. Much like the other expansion in this bundle, the game was not originally built as a stand alone title, but as a literal add-on to GTA IV, and as such carries most of it’s graphical strengths and weaknesses. Also as such, to avoid repeating myself, I am going to ask you to look back at the graphics review of The Lost and Damned above for a much fuller picture of how this fairs.
7/10
Sound: Much like the Lost and Damned, this game relies on ambient sound most of the time when not driving a vehicle, reducing how often you hear it. However, while in just about any vehicle, the radio is pretty-much the perfect source of music. Whatever your taste, you can reach a descent sized selection of it! But this is to be expected as it is the exact same selection.
The same can be said of the sound effects since again, it is basically using the same resources as the other expansion.
But the voice acting is the real star here, even more then The Lost and Damned. Where that expansion was populated with bikers who are generally the same type of people for the most part, The Ballad of Gay Tony has a much more varied cast, from the over-dramatic but business savvy (usually) Tony of the title, to the crazy childhood friends of Luis who are trying to build a drug-dealing empire, to even some old “friends” from the previous expansion. There are few characters you will spend any serious time with that you will not be entertained by.
9/10
Gameplay: Where the Lost and Damned held itself together enough for you to finish it by descent gameplay, this expansion proves how important this element is by completely coming apart about half-way through in this department. Don’t get me wrong, the game starts strong with a comedic romp involving putting golfballs into a mafia guy’s face as he’s tied to a golf cart, and ultimately using that same cart in a chase to escape his buddies. But it doesn’t take long for the game to get to much more standard missions of mayhem and destruction you would expect.
This would at least make the game play a little stronger then The Lost and Damned, but that’s before you consider you are no longer able to use the bikes as your main means of transportation. After all, as noted in the Lost and Damned section, cars drive like ass. They are clunky, large, tend to slide, and tough to move around the city. Bikes were easier in that they still didn’t drive well, but at least they were small and therefore easier to move around other cars which populate the streets and driven by an idiotic AI. In this game, you almost never use the bikes, making getting your way around the city one HELL of a chore. And it does not help that a cop can hit you and suddenly you have to ditch them like it’s your fault when they will turn into you like every other idiot AI driving in this game.
But sadly, vehicles get even worse in this game due to one mission in which you need to steal a military helicopter. Upon successfully doing so you find out just how god-awful and damn near impossible a helicopter is to drive with a keyboard and mouse, making your mission to blow up the boat and escaping smaller boats impossible to finish without throwing yourself into the bay and drowning as your chopper is ruined and you have to start again. Seriously you are lucky if the chopper reacts like you are drunk at the wheel the way the controls were setup for this interface. It’s actually so bad, I took the time to look at both gamefaq and youtube for advice for this mission, only to be told it’s outright impossible without a controller, forcing you to change your control scheme entirely for a single mission.
And then you find how badly that controller plays against a keyboard in literally everything else. You can’t turn half as well as the mouse and keyboard lets you once you get used to the cars (it actually curves nicer not forcing hard turns, BUT you cant turn half as tightly for the same reason), and boats, forget about it. Your turn radius is so bad you basically have to do bombing passes to get your boat to the back of the yacht you are trying to get on and even when you do, there is a good chance Luis won’t understand you are trying to jump onto it. Seriously I needed at least 5 attempts to get from the boat you take out there to the yacht deck because Luis just refused to grab the handrail and pull himself over unlike when I played on the keyboard and it worked perfectly EVERY time. Add to this a complete lack of the auto-aim I watched used when shooting up baddies in the console version when looking for advice (yep… PC does NOT have auto aim cause they expected you to use the mouse… and they still fucked up this hard on a NECESSARY mission) and really a controller is a PISS poor choice for the PC release of the game.
But all that makes the helicopter worth it, right? Nope. It’s still horrible. It moves clunky as hell and only slightly less like a drunken man stumbling around in the air then it does with a control scheme based on using the mouse to angle it for movement. The result is this mission is still horrible enough of a broken mess to basically ruin the entire expansion. At this point I’m fairly certain at least on PC, the only way to get through this single NECESSARY to win mission is to use a saved game trainer and cheat, fooling the game into believing the mission is finished. (And in fact, this is how a lot of people did it. according to the commentary on the video I went to watch for help.)
0/10
Bugs: To put it bluntly, this game is based on GTA IV, a game nortiously badly ported to the PC when it finally arrived, and it still shows in this collection to this day.
- STILL runs slow at times: The only reason I was able to run this game smoothly was I am playing on hardware released at least 5 years after the game, and even some modern PCs today have a hard time playing it for reasons no one has figured out. Code-wise this game is total and absolute garbage, but MOST people today have enough horsepower in their PCs to brute-force past this problem. But it should be noted as a warning in case others find problems like this even now. But that is not to say even I got a perfectly smooth ride. One of the few in-engine cutscenes was a complete slideshow despite all the extra horsepower!
- Graphic controls? Who needs them! Before I decided to play on Abraxas, I decided to try on my much less powerful MCP media center in my living room. The game defaulted to 1080 and ran at about 15-20 fps. However, this is the first and ONLY game that refused to change resolution on me to help with this, only changing how big on the screen it played. Looking around, it seems this is a common issue introduced in the final version of the PC release and the only way to fix it is to DOWNGRADE THE GAME.
- Bitmap distance is unstable: This is an odd technical issue which rears it’s head to ruin the look of the game from time to time, but when it comes to care on the road, the game seems unable to decide when it wants to fill in the bitmaps and not just show models on the road or detailed work on the buildings. This can result in graphics jumping into being in some of the most jarring ways… and then we get to the one predictable one. One of the underground tunnels is apparently marked as a loading point for one of the major parts of the city, but done poorly. As a result, you will drive up to a solid grey surface with absolutely zero distance in this tunnel, only for it to pop in when you are just about to drive on it (and the first time you see it fear you are about to drop off the map).
- The AI: I’m going to call the AI a bug in itself on this game, it is just that dumb. In gunfights, the AI barely change position when its in it’s advantage to do so, but that’s only the predictable stuff. I have watched cars run into each other for no good reason what-so-ever, and even kill themselves in front of me. Literally I watched a taxi 3 cars ahead of me turn and successfully drive off one of the biggest bridges in Liberty City with nothing instigating it. I watched another try and fail after tapping his rear bumper, (thank god for fences). I've watch guys try to run away from a location only to get themselves trapped inside a closing fence and being too stupid to take the out I tried to give them. I even watch some random asshole carrying a bag of groceries throw it on the ground and look down sadly at the debris of food now at their feet. The AI really is unbelievably stupid in this game.
Overall: I really wanted to like this collection. I really did. The theme of the Lost and Damned struck me as something fun to play and in fact was the reason I wanted this in the first place. And when the game collection was picked as my next title, the Ballad of Gay Tony had a trailer that just made the game look bright and fun as hell. And I went into this game knowing the PC version was a terrible port so I expected to have some technical issues arise. Sadly, the issues that killed this game in the end weren’t technical in the traditional sense for the second game, or at all for the first.
The first proved a lot more dull and generic then I was hoping for while the second literally pissed itself away by taking an already hated mechanic of the original title (flying), breaking it utterly for the controls that work best for the rest of this release of the game (keyboard and mouse) and demanding you finish a broken game-section left in it’s wake (or modify your saved game to bypass it if you don’t mind outright cheating) in order to finish. In short, one was far less then it should have been while the other was a utterly broken mess.
Still, since at least one of the two games is NOT broken, I can’t score the whole package a 0. That is literally it’s saving grace.
Score:
3/10
System Requirements:
- 1.8Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo or 2.4Ghz AMD Athlon X2 64
- 1.5 GB RAM
- Nvidia Geforce 7900 or ATI X1900 (256MB VRAM minimum)
- 16 GB hard drive
- Windows Vista SP1 or XP SP3
- NOTE: This game requires Games for Windows LIVE
System Specs:
- AMD FX 8350 (8 cores) running at 4 Ghz
- 16 GB RAM
- NVidia GeForce 960 GTX with 4 GB VRAM
- Windows 10
Source: Steam
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