Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony review

The final missions on offer at the moment, Going Deep and Sexy Time, are similar exercises in fleet-footed excess, the former seeing you setting a fiery ambush for a bunch of corrupt cops, while the latter has you racing across the bay in a speedboat to fetch Yusuf a new make of attack helicopter currently being marketed on a luxury yacht. Playing out in an underground parking garage, Going Deep is all about the game's new sticky grenades - laid in advance, and then triggered in one go while you watch from behind a car, or thrown out the window as you make your high-speed escape. Sexy Time, however, hinges on the joys of guided missiles as you make off with the nifty new chopper before using it to sink the yacht and finish off any fleeing survivors.

With its new weapons and easygoing lead, Gay Tony seems built for the impromptu GTA rampages of old, and the icing on the cake comes in the shape of that parachute introduced with Dropping In. While the 'chute features in missions, it comes into its own with a series of target markers spread around the city. It's brilliant fun to pulp traffic and blast pedestrians' hats off with that explosive shotgun, of course, but the most enjoyment to be had on this visit to Liberty City so far is in spiralling down off the roof of a skyscraper to land on the back of a moving vehicle. Triggers and thumb-sticks give you total control over swooping, turning, and shifting your weight to speed up your descent, and there's a distinct hint of Super Monkey Ball in the way the game encourages you to open your parachute at the very last possible minute.

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.