Tearing aimlessly through the streets of Liberty City, we punch the throttle of our stolen ride to see just how much speed we can squeeze out of a pokey four-door sedan. The commuter car's engine hums as we drift around a corner, and a group of pedestrians wanders into our field of view. Without a second thought, we swerve onto the sidewalk and slam into a middle-aged woman, leaving a blood-splashed dent in our car's hood as the remaining peds scatter in confusion.

"That wasn't nice," says Rockstar's VP of Development Jeronimo Barrera, watching over our shoulders with mock disapproval. He's about to oversee (and participate in) our first brush with the multiplayer modes in Grand Theft Auto IV, which we've traveled to Rockstar's offices in New York to see - but first, we're re-familiarizing ourselves with the game with a quick single-player practice run. And as anyone familiar with the franchise knows, there's no better way to learn a GTA game's ins and outs than to go absolutely apeshit at ridiculous speeds, running over a bunch of pedestrians and getting chased by cops before exploding in a glorious rollover fireball. Which is exactly what we do.

After about 20 minutes of this, we're instructed to get out of our latest car and whip out protagonist Niko Bellic's cell phone. Clicking through its simple onscreen menus, we find the multiplayer options, create a custom (female, even) avatar and run through a quick tutorial to learn the finer points of shooting other players in the face. We then leave Niko behind for a new kind of chaos - the kind that involves up to 16 players, 14 different game modes and a whole lot of carnage.

If you've ever played against friends in either of the PSP GTAs, you'll have a rough idea of what to expect from GTA IV's - very ¬rough. While those games restrict players to simple match types in relatively small chunks of their cities, GTA IV introduces a little more complexity, and gives you the entire city to run amok in, complete with cars, helicopters and whatever other vehicles you can get your hands on. If that's too open, though, you can scale your urban battlefields down to single boroughs, or even individual neighborhoods.

From there, the player hosting the match can tinker with a bunch of variables within each match type, including available weapons, weather conditions, the time of day and whether or not you want civilians running around getting in your way. You can also decide whether to turn the cops on or off - which makes matches considerably more chaotic, as they'll go after everybody - and if you're worried about auto-aim making things too easy, you can turn it off entirely.

We had a chance to try out five of the new match types during our sessions with Rockstar, with three GR editors - Chris Antista and Mikel Reparaz in the US, and Matt Cundy in the UK - tackling the game and coming away with three different perspectives.

This mode is exactly what it sounds like: two (hopefully) even teams of players hunt each other throughout the city (or chunks of it), using whatever implements of death they can find scattered around. Although nearly every match type is focused on "points" in one way or another - which you'll score by picking up the wads of cash your enemies drop when they die - it's the central goal here, with the biggest collectors declared the winners at the end of each timed match.

Mikel Reparaz: Our first TD session was at Happiness Island, the game's to-scale version of Ellis Island. After a few nasty run-ins with the opposing team around the base of the statue, Barrera (who was mercifully on our side) told me to follow him to one of the island's more remote areas, where a car was secretly stashed behind an outbuilding. We both piled in, smashed out the windows and - guns at the ready - turned the car into a rolling siege engine against the other team, who were holed up in the Statue of Happiness' lobby.

Unfortunately, as fun as it is to roll with a few friends in a deathwagon bristling with freely aimable, octopus-like gun-arms, it's really difficult to aim accurately when you're rolling at high speed up a flight of stairs. We only did a little damage before some fool with a sniper rifle blew my head off with a shot through the windshield, and while I waited to respawn, Barrera was left seriously outgunned. Naturally, it wasn't long before the car was reduced to a burned-out hulk that cluttered up the stairwell for the rest of the match.

Apparently, you can go up inside the statue itself, although I only got as far as the multi-tiered platform surrounding it - where I found a sniper rifle and proceeded to rack up a couple of long-distance kills, sniping at any movement I saw through the leafy trees around the statue's base. After a few minutes of this, someone shot a rocket launcher and sent me sprawling back down to the ground. Mainly, I kept getting stuck either running around the perimeter of the statue's base, or getting gunned down on the central promenade leading up to the entrance, which is essentially just a big, open walkway where you're protected only by shadows and the canopy's pylons, which you can at least cover behind.

Chris Antista: At first this was just a balls out kill-a-thon confined to the ground, but eventually the other team found it wise to migrate up into the Statue of Happiness's base. (Sorry Hot Coffee fans, this looks to be the only lady you can "enter.") Thing is, the new aiming allows for some pretty precise shots with or without a sniper rifle, so a good vantage point works great even with a pistol. Needless to say, we got annihilated until we could enter the statue, work our way up, and force fate upon our aggressors.

Outside from a few waist-high walls along the island's walkways, the area around Lady Happiness is fairly open and without solid cover, and colored dots - both on your radar and floating above each player's head - let you know who’s on what side, but can also give away your position. However, crouching removes the tell-tale dot from your pursuers' screens, and even allowed me to sneak along the outskirts, among herds of pedestrians, completely unnoticed.

I’ll come clean: I crouched in the foliage next to the statue’s main entrance and picked off anyone fool enough to go for the weapons and armor sitting out in the open. Phew! It feels good to get that off my chest, but prospective campers should note that cowardice such as mine, will not be rewarded. Cash dropped by the fallen - not kills - determines your online rank, so if you lack the balls to come out of your hidey-hole, the entire internet’s gonna know about it.

Matt Cundy: The Liberty and Vice City Stories deathmatch modes on PSP never really did it for me, and I don't think GTA IV's is going to either. Liberty City is absolutely awe-inspiring in single player, but for me it just doesn't double particularly well as a stage for team-based showdowns. Sure, there's always some special kind of fun to be had when you can send a friend tumbling over the bonnet of a car or shoot a rocket up their ass, but it never seemed to reach the same riotous levels of mayhem as just going on an impromptu rampage in single player. For me, this was definitely the weakest of all the multiplayer modes I played.