13 Years Later, GTA IV's Episodic Expansions for PC Have Replay Value for Days

It might be a little jarring transitioning back to playing Grand Theft Auto: The Lost and Damned (TLAD) and Grand Theft Auto: and the Ballad of Gay Tony (TBoGT) if you've spent the last decade instinctively used to the twitchier, more manically-paced successor game in the series, Grand Theft Auto V. But trust us, dealing with a slightly clunky PC user interface is well worth taking a deep dive into what top-quality, triple-A open world video games used to play like. Compared to how things work today, it really makes you think about how much things have changed.

In any case, to get a good taste of what the golden age of Grand Theft Auto used to feel like, we thought it proper to play two of each game's early-stage missions. So we get a chance to acquaint ourselves with each game's cast of larger-than-life characters. These missions are "Chinese Takeout" and "Sexy Time" for TBoGT, and "Angels in America" and "It's War" for TLAD. Be it the disheveled but level-headed Jewish biker-gang Vice President Johnny Klebbitz in TLAD or the smooth-talking Dominican-American nightclub manager bodyguard Luis Lopez, you get the sense every single interaction these two characters have with their side characters has weight and meaning behind it.

There's very little filler dialogue in both TLAD and TBoGT. Apart from the "verbose" language, you could turn each line of dialog into a pretty awesome screenplay. All the better when you're immersed in a sprawling, beautifully rendered Liberty City's four boroughs, plus the State of Alderney, that looks remarkably different from the base Grand Theft Auto IV game despite being the same game map. Using very deliberate tweaks to the ambient lightning between the base game, The Lost and Damned, and the Balad of Gay Tony, the atmosphere between all three games is radically different.

In The Lost and Damned, the ambient lighting brings a peculiar amber color to the gameplay experience, almost to mimic the tense and murky atmosphere between Johnny Klebbitz and his legitimately psychopathic Road Captain Billy Grey. Meanwhile, the lighting throughout The Ballad of Gay Tony has a much brighter, more vibrant, and effervescent vibe to the game. As if to mimic the sensation of the party drugs known to be consumed en-masse at the two nightclubs that Louis helps run for his boss, Anthony "Gay Tony" Prince.

With just two missions and a little over an hour and a half worth of gameplay to work with, there are few games from any era that feel like such a warm, familiar blanket than anything running on Rockstar's RAGE engine, but especially anything related to Grand Theft Auto. Though vehicle physics are radically different and more boat-like than the stiff, responsive controls of GTA V and GTA Online, it'll take a little getting used to re-adjusting to the slightly different game physics and control scheme.

One thing that well, say, if you think helicopter flight is a you-know-what and a half in GTA Online using a mouse and keyboard, the GTA IV saga will remind you how easy modern players have it these days. With the Lost and Damned especially, it's interesting to see how much cool gameplay Rockstar games managed to cram into a fairly simple episodic offshoot game of what was then one of the best-selling games in history. Riding in formation and driving over the highlighted Lost MC gang logo to gain health and armor was a lovely touch to remind you you're not just playing a breathed-on GTA IV expansion.

But in terms of sheer lunacy, The Ballad of Gay Tony takes the cake. Though TLAD gets its own assortment of unique weapons, TBoGT's bespoke weapons seem to pack that little bit of extra punch compared to its counterpart game. But there's also a sense that the exclusive driveable vehicles in TBoGT dwarf its sibling game in terms of appeal. Motorcycles like the Dinka Akuma streetfighter, cars like the Dodge Charger-based Buffalo Sedan, and one of the fastest land vehicles in the game, the Police Stinger, combine with exclusive helicopters like the Buzzard, based on an attack variant of the real-life MD Helicopters MH-6 Little Bird. That only scratches the surface, by the way.

It's these kinds of mad machines that would one-day standard for GTA Online to one-day usurp. In terms of replay factor, after just four missions, we're convinced we could complete both story modes for GTA IV's dual expansions and still have time left over to write up a full review of each game, plus a good portion of the base game. Though its success, Grand Theft Auto V is no doubt addicting in its own right, there's a certain, non-tangible factor about the GTA IV universe that the modern game can never match. In the same way, Los Angeles is the polar opposite of New York City, GTA IV, and Liberty City is the antithesis of GTA V and Los Santos/San Andreas.

There are plenty of people who enjoy both play styles in their own way. But there are still a few out there who still prefer the more modest, down-to-earth feeling of GTA IV and its expanded universe that would rather fire up a single-player mode for any of the three titles in the series than fire up GTA V's single-player mode in 2023. As for the online multiplayer for PC port, it's a shame to say that the miserable failure that was Games for Windows Live left GTA IV's multiplayer pretty much bricked. If not for that singular catastrophic problem, the GTA expanded universe for PC still has replay value for days.