Jacob wasn't satisfied with that, however; he wanted to teach their friends a lesson, too, so we drove him out to a brownstone house filled with drug dealers. This was where we got our official introduction to the game's Gears of War-style cover system, which enables Niko to flatten himself against walls by hitting R1. While hiding next to a door or window, we were able to aim carefully before popping out to squeeze off a shot, although we had almost as much success just blind-firing into the brownstone's window, which shattered after a few shots as the shotgun-toting dealer behind it groaned and keeled over.

With Jacob finally happy, we were free to go off and meet with a couple of Russian gangsters, one of them a kind-hearted man of the people and the other a paranoid sociopath. Long story short, the sociopath wanted Niko to go and whack some poor sap named Lenny who probably didn't deserve it, and Niko reluctantly agreed. After driving out to a spot near where the target lived, Niko called the sociopath on his cell phone and asked if he wanted to cancel the hit. Of course not. Lenny was last seen waiting at a nearby train platform, said the sociopath, and Niko should go and meet him there immediately.

Climbing the stairs to the train led to a brief confrontation with Lenny and - surprise! - Lenny's bodyguard, who opened fire with a submachinegun before we capped him with a couple well-aimed pistol shots. While we were occupied, Lenny fled across the tracks, and running after him led us into another car chase. After bashing out the driver's side window, we opened fire, and all of a sudden Lenny's car slowed to a crawl and stopped. One of the bullet holes in his car's rear windshield had a blood splatter around it. We'd successfully shot Lenny in the back of the head as he was driving at high speed. As Niko called in to let his friends know the job was done, we decided to jack Lenny's sportier ride, which meant opening the door to let his body slump out onto the street before we could climb behind the wheel.

Two more missions awaited us, and this is where things started to get really interesting, as Rockstar decided to cut loose and just give us a full arsenal to play around with. First, though, we had to meet Packie, a foul-mouthed scumbag who swears in front of his own mother and has a sister Niko's almost certainly going to end up dating. Packie had a line on a shipment of cloned medications being smuggled in by the Triads, which meant we had to drive down to a dockside warehouse (while Packie and Niko chat about Niko's stint in an Eastern European prison) to intercept it.

Once there, we followed Packie as he scaled the side of the warehouse, jumping up to climb onto heating ducts and shimmying across horizontal bars to find better footholds. Eventually clambering up onto the roof gave us a complete view of what was below: a bunch of Triad goons unloading boxes from a cabin cruiser and hauling them onto a waiting truck. Once they were finished, it was time to make our move, so we leveled an RPG right at the boat, unleashing a spiraling explosive that reduced the boat to a blackened wreck and sent one of its occupants flying hundreds of feet out into open water. A few more rockets softened up the rest of the thugs, who were now sliding behind cover and opening up on us with automatic weapons fire. Dropping down onto the pavement, we switched over to a submachine gun and started methodically dropping them, one by one, until we realized we were standing out in the open like idiots and ran for cover. By then we'd cleared up most of the resistance, however, and a few more rockets were all that was needed to give us a clear path to the truck.

What's interesting is that, while we were sidling around behind cover, we got a big shock: an older-looking cop ambled through the foreground. Apparently, he wasn't interested in the firefight that was raging around him, or in trying to stop whatever we might be up to with our big, illegal guns. In fact, he seemed content to ignore the violence altogether, and it wasn't until we'd blasted one of the thugs' cover spots with a rocket that he realized what was going on - at which point he attempted to dive behind that cover spot, which was completely engulfed in flames. In another second, so was he. Sad.