GTA IV: The Lost and Damned (Xbox 360)
Genre: Third-Person Action Publisher: Rockstar Games Developer: Rockstar North Players: 1-16
If you read our hands-on last week you’ll know a bit of the story. From that article: “Johnny Klebitz is the second-in-command of the Alderley motorcycle club, The Lost. While chapter president Billy Grey is in rehab, Johnny makes headway in securing the future of The Lost, but when Billy arrives back in town with destruction on his mind, Johnny has to face the fact that the future of the chapter is being jeopardised by its actions, and he must decide what to do, even though loyalty is his biggest trait.”
While the game progresses, Johnny’s perspective on Billy’s motives begin to clarify and through a series of missions the tale unfolds as you expected right from the outset. Factions within factions, differing objectives and goals and other plot twists set The Lost not only on a collision course with the inhabitants of Liberty City, but with itself.
As with GTA IV, once you begin playing through, characters become available offering new jobs and missions and intertwining with the story from GTA IV nicely. Pangs of remembrance will be common as you bump into the likes of Playboy X, Ray, Elizabeta and Niko himself as you follow your path, which is one of the key things about The Lost and Damned - it has history without actually having any of its own. It’s also worth pointing out that despite this being a download, no effort has been spared in the depth the developers went to with character development. Through the thickness of the plot, love lost, the effects of drug addiction, jealousy and revenge all come through not just because the script says so, but in the voices and movements of the actors. Simply excellent.
Making the game focus on motorcycles also means an opportunity for greater expansion of the use of vehicles. While it may seem obvious that cruising around on your chopper should be the way to do things, I often found it easier to use a car. The bikes lose grip at high speeds while cornering, and countering a slide often send you sliding the opposite way to the original slip. Cresting a hill at speed will more often than not see you bounce around upon landing, often showing the slightly unwieldy physics the bikes now have to have to allow you use them as a primary vehicle at all. Doing a 360 with your front wheel pointing to the heavens doesn’t mean you have to fall off, apparently. I also found it harder to throw the cars around corners too, so whether or not the modified physics were just for the bikes or for all vehicles I’m not too sure.
But realism isn’t what you came here for, and if you want to get the most out of the environmental additions then two wheels is the only way to do it. You can now call friends to help you, either to bring you a bike if you total yours, to buy new weapons, or for assistance on missions, and they ride in convoy behind you as you cruise. Later missions see you leading an entourage of 10 or so Lost members across the city and that really slams home the setting. Lawbreaking is the order of the day and to be good at it, you need your friends, and your bike, because they don’t drive Bobcats.
The new game modes also require you to be on your chopper to activate. First off are races, which are nothing new as such but the inclusion of a very Sega Mega Drive-Road Rash influence is welcome for its retro nature and its practical implications. When you race your bikes, you can swing a baseball bat either side of you in an effort to smack opposing riders into walls and thus, onto the floor. It’s not as easy as it sounds – trying to actually race means it’s not the simplest thing to smack people.
The second game-specific feature is Gang Wars, of which there are 25 scattered around the city. These vary, but often it’s either ride to a location with your Brotherhood and eliminate the other gang members, or chase down some vehicles, such as vans, and destroy them. Doing these missions raises the stats of your gang members, so the longer one stays alive the stronger they will be, and with a better accuracy. Those that fall on the road can be remembered on a memorial wall in the clubhouse.
The clubhouse itself is also a bigger, better version of a safe house. Here you can play a card game, arm wrestle your mates, listen to some banging metal music and store vehicles.
Getting online has also been beefed up considerably. New modes such as Chopper vs Chopper are awesome fun, with one player on a bike trying to reach a checkpoint while another player in a helicopter firing explosive rounds tries to stop them. There are more features that are bike specific too, but many of them are variations on the modes in GTA IV.
Now, the metal. Allow me to indulge myself for a moment, because I’m an old school metalhead at heart and The Lost and Damned hit me square between the eyes. When I was at the playtest I heard a Sepultura track, but couldn’t write about it. Well, not only do some old thrash and death metal elements feature (Entombed being another), but Sepultura’s frontman Max Cavalera hosts one of the radio shows (as does Iggy Pop and Juliette Lewis). It was awesome hearing their tunes but beyond metal, there’s a whole range of music, both licensed and custom written, all over the stations.
It might weigh in at a massive 1.78Gb of a download, but the sheer volume of new content is the reason why. Lots of play time, lots to do, lots to see and hear and lots of fun to be had. The Lost and Damned has set a new benchmark for the quality of downloadable content and other developers take note. Two or three hours game time in an unrelated zone hardly comes close to matching this. Quite simply, anyone who enjoyed GTA IV should make downloading this their highest priority.
You can read our hands-on article here.
By Keith B (19th Feb 2009)
There’s sufficient material in the downloadable pack to consider it as almost a new game. And it’s a damned good one at that.
Liberty City, the sandbox that played out all our fun in GTA IV has opened its highways and byways once again, this time to allow gamers see the city and its inhabitants from a different perspective, and without all the friend-making the original included. For 1600MS points you get a new campaign, featuring new characters and a whole range of smaller tweaks to the content that it really does surprise you again and again on a playthrough.
In fact, you really have to consider The Lost and Damned as a full-on expansion rather than your typical DLC, which is normally bolted-on content. With over 20 missions, a whole range of side quests that are both new and a return of old favourites, boosted with new radio shows and music along with websites to visit, side games to play and new weapons to unleash, there’s a whole lot of, well, new stuff here.
If you read our hands-on last week you’ll know a bit of the story. From that article: “Johnny Klebitz is the second-in-command of the Alderley motorcycle club, The Lost. While chapter president Billy Grey is in rehab, Johnny makes headway in securing the future of The Lost, but when Billy arrives back in town with destruction on his mind, Johnny has to face the fact that the future of the chapter is being jeopardised by its actions, and he must decide what to do, even though loyalty is his biggest trait.”
While the game progresses, Johnny’s perspective on Billy’s motives begin to clarify and through a series of missions the tale unfolds as you expected right from the outset. Factions within factions, differing objectives and goals and other plot twists set The Lost not only on a collision course with the inhabitants of Liberty City, but with itself.
As with GTA IV, once you begin playing through, characters become available offering new jobs and missions and intertwining with the story from GTA IV nicely. Pangs of remembrance will be common as you bump into the likes of Playboy X, Ray, Elizabeta and Niko himself as you follow your path, which is one of the key things about The Lost and Damned - it has history without actually having any of its own. It’s also worth pointing out that despite this being a download, no effort has been spared in the depth the developers went to with character development. Through the thickness of the plot, love lost, the effects of drug addiction, jealousy and revenge all come through not just because the script says so, but in the voices and movements of the actors. Simply excellent.
Making the game focus on motorcycles also means an opportunity for greater expansion of the use of vehicles. While it may seem obvious that cruising around on your chopper should be the way to do things, I often found it easier to use a car. The bikes lose grip at high speeds while cornering, and countering a slide often send you sliding the opposite way to the original slip. Cresting a hill at speed will more often than not see you bounce around upon landing, often showing the slightly unwieldy physics the bikes now have to have to allow you use them as a primary vehicle at all. Doing a 360 with your front wheel pointing to the heavens doesn’t mean you have to fall off, apparently. I also found it harder to throw the cars around corners too, so whether or not the modified physics were just for the bikes or for all vehicles I’m not too sure.
But realism isn’t what you came here for, and if you want to get the most out of the environmental additions then two wheels is the only way to do it. You can now call friends to help you, either to bring you a bike if you total yours, to buy new weapons, or for assistance on missions, and they ride in convoy behind you as you cruise. Later missions see you leading an entourage of 10 or so Lost members across the city and that really slams home the setting. Lawbreaking is the order of the day and to be good at it, you need your friends, and your bike, because they don’t drive Bobcats.
The new game modes also require you to be on your chopper to activate. First off are races, which are nothing new as such but the inclusion of a very Sega Mega Drive-Road Rash influence is welcome for its retro nature and its practical implications. When you race your bikes, you can swing a baseball bat either side of you in an effort to smack opposing riders into walls and thus, onto the floor. It’s not as easy as it sounds – trying to actually race means it’s not the simplest thing to smack people.
The second game-specific feature is Gang Wars, of which there are 25 scattered around the city. These vary, but often it’s either ride to a location with your Brotherhood and eliminate the other gang members, or chase down some vehicles, such as vans, and destroy them. Doing these missions raises the stats of your gang members, so the longer one stays alive the stronger they will be, and with a better accuracy. Those that fall on the road can be remembered on a memorial wall in the clubhouse.
The clubhouse itself is also a bigger, better version of a safe house. Here you can play a card game, arm wrestle your mates, listen to some banging metal music and store vehicles.
Getting online has also been beefed up considerably. New modes such as Chopper vs Chopper are awesome fun, with one player on a bike trying to reach a checkpoint while another player in a helicopter firing explosive rounds tries to stop them. There are more features that are bike specific too, but many of them are variations on the modes in GTA IV.
Now, the metal. Allow me to indulge myself for a moment, because I’m an old school metalhead at heart and The Lost and Damned hit me square between the eyes. When I was at the playtest I heard a Sepultura track, but couldn’t write about it. Well, not only do some old thrash and death metal elements feature (Entombed being another), but Sepultura’s frontman Max Cavalera hosts one of the radio shows (as does Iggy Pop and Juliette Lewis). It was awesome hearing their tunes but beyond metal, there’s a whole range of music, both licensed and custom written, all over the stations.
It might weigh in at a massive 1.78Gb of a download, but the sheer volume of new content is the reason why. Lots of play time, lots to do, lots to see and hear and lots of fun to be had. The Lost and Damned has set a new benchmark for the quality of downloadable content and other developers take note. Two or three hours game time in an unrelated zone hardly comes close to matching this. Quite simply, anyone who enjoyed GTA IV should make downloading this their highest priority.
You can read our hands-on article here.
9.4
Single Play
9.4
Friend Play
9.0
Multi Play
8.4
Graphics
8.8
Sound
9.3
Challenge
8.5
Entertainment
9.4
Share On:
Comments
GTA IV: The Lost and Damned
Vital stats
GTA IV: The Lost and Damned (X360)
-
we say:
9.4 - you say: 7.5
- scores: 4 your score: 0/10
Related Videos
More Xbox 360 Reviews
|
Crackdown 2 |
|
|
Toy Story 3 |
|
|
Singularity |
|
|
Transformers: War for Cybertron |
|
|
Pure Football |
|
Looks pretty good : )
What a fantastic game. It's great not having to learn the streets again, and yet having a whole new game to play.