Just as Rockstar are verging on gaming’s closest thing to a Scorcese film, they swing the needle back toward a big zany playground for something that’s bigger, but not necessarily better.

At this moment, the entire gaming world seems to be be focused on the year’s megaton release, Modern Warfare 2. And rightly so. It’s a big, meaty, incredibly popular (and somewhat controversial) game that’s well worth discussing, and which we’ll get to here soon enough.

But sneaking in just before it was a quick bonus pack from that other action behemoth, Grand Theft Auto 4, with their latest follow-up chapter, The Ballad of Gay Tony. And though the timing may be unfortunate, any release in this series still deserves its share of attention before moving on to months of nightly multi-player.

As with the previous chapter, The Lost and Damned, just enough time has passed since our last stint in Liberty City to make revisiting its crime-ridden streets feel like coming home again. Another nine months go by, and we take up with another gang of misanthropes chasing their version of the American Dream — mostly through sprees of gleeful violence and reckless driving. Never let it be said that Rockstar’s games aren’t a hell of a lot of fun to tool around in.

GTA IV proper, however, marked a more serious turn for the series, putting less emphasis on the mayhem and more on the relationships between its central characters. The Lost and Damned continued this trend, stripping out some of the distracting elements of the full game and focusing even further on storytelling, including a few clever crossovers with the plot line of the previous installment.

Yet just as they’re verging on gaming’s closest thing to a Scorcese film — a complex work with a dramatic point of view on criminal life that still manages to have fun with its trappings, à la Goodfellas — they swing the needle back toward a big zany playground in The Ballad of Gay Tony for something that’s bigger, but not necessarily better.

The trajectory seemed set. With the HD graphics and improved motion capture made possible by next-generation consoles, the team could take a grittier, more realistic approach. Now was the time to leave the cartoonishness of the previous volumes behind, or at least let it fade into the background of pedestrian banter and radio chatter. Both GTA IV and its surprisingly strong follow-up in The Lost delivered on this, and suggested a series that was growing up (as discussed in our last review).

But to a large extent, they’ve abandoned that trajectory with this chapter. One can only guess at their reasons, but to an outside observer it’s as if the story tellers and game designers are fighting an internal battle. One side wants to make a sophisticated crime drama, and the other is fixed on a list of “Wouldn’t this be cool?” action sequences. Where the writers were winning the last round, with a story of tough choices and decaying relationships between factions of a biker gang, the winners here were clearly the action movie fans.

You play as Luis Lopez, reformed corner kid who has risen to the position of business partner/enforcer for the title character and his struggling pair of nightclubs. But in a leap of logic that even GTA barely manages, the bulk of your time is spent sky diving, taking down swat teams with enormously powerful guns, or flying helicopters into firefights. For all the fun that is, it comes at the expense of a coherent story. There are plenty of coarse jokes, outlandish side characters, and exciting set-pieces, but the central relationship between Luis and Tony never feels believable. As a result, the whole over-the-top escapade feels more like a missed opportunity than a welcome departure.

In fact, it shares flaws with their third release of the last generation, San Andreas. In that volume, they expanded the world (probably a little too much; those interstate drives could be awfully long), they added more craziness (jetpacks? really?), and the characterization suffered as a result. What could have been a tightly focused and more meaningful story of gang life in Los Angeles became a bloated epic without a clear course. Sure, it was still fun, but it wasn’t anything close to the step forward that its predecessor Vice City was.

The only excuse that comes to mind is that it must be hard to please all of your millions of fans when you’re among the biggest-selling games of all time. Some want more carnage, and Gay Tony is unapologetically for them. But some, like myself, were hopeful that the more adult storytelling shown in GTA IV and sharpened in The Lost might continue to evolve in this next installment.

In a time where a dozen games have spun off the open-world formula into their own brand of explosive chaos, Grand Theft Auto shouldn’t be trying to out-jump Crackdown or out-demolish Red Faction. Let the newcomers have their action-packed comic-book fun, because that’s what they’re good at. But the team at Rockstar is one of the few who’ve shown talent at pushing the boundaries of what games can be. We can only hope they get back to what they’re best at before too long.