Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony review

The first mission Rockstar unveils during a recent visit to the company's London offices sets the tone brilliantly. Dropping In sees you tasked with helping out a Russian gangster who plans to buy the Liberty City ice hockey team - and in this case, "helping out" means shooting the current owner in the head until he agrees to the deal. It's a simple agenda, then, but Rockstar breezes through the checkpoints in the most lavish manner imaginable, choppering you high above the owner's penthouse offices (Gay Tony allows players to reach loftier altitudes than they ever could previously, which, besides providing a very obscure bullet point for the back of the box, blends well with the return of San Andreas' parachute, allowing Rockstar to mess around amongst the rooftops of its playground in a way it hasn't for a while). Then you're sent skydiving down onto the roof, shooting your way into the boardroom, and making your escape, post-execution, by parachuting through a window and onto a flat-bed truck passing below.

It's a hilariously fast-paced killing spree, aided by a nasty addition to GTA's arsenal in the form of the P90, a gun that allegedly fires 900 rounds a minute. (Is that even possible? I was taking notes in the dark.) It's the first of a handful of new weapons available, all of them tilted towards the dramatic end of the scale, and while it's a beast, chewing through security guards and blasting open doors in a style you might not initially be prepared for, it's a shrinking violet compared to what you'll get later on.

The second mission I'm shown, and the first I get to play through, only reinforces the sensation that Gay Tony sees Rockstar letting its hair down. In For the Man who has Everything, Yusuf - a middle-eastern crime pudding in a dorky tracksuit who featured fleetingly in GTAIV itself, and who is brilliantly voiced in this instalment by Omid Djalili - wants to get hold of a Liberty City subway carriage to decorate a hotel he's building overseas. This sends you leaping onto the roof of a passing tube train and uncoupling the last coach, before it's winched away by helicopter.

Always competitive, the police have their own helicopters of course, and the sky's soon thick with them, buzzing overhead and peppering everything with bullets. Luckily, you're carrying perhaps the finest addition to GTA's weapon set, the AA12, an automatic shotgun that comes in two varieties: one of them fires standard rounds, another unleashes explosive shells. This is the latter, as it happens, and it makes light work of the helicopters, tearing them out of the sky in flaming chunks, and leaving you to duck the occasional falling propeller. The AA12 is so horribly effective you almost feel bad using it, and its very presence turns a mission that on paper is rather simple into an explosive speed-run.