Grand Theft Auto IV

Approximately the same length as The Lost and Damned, Gay Tony should contain around 20 missions. As part of our hands on with the DLC, we got to play through four – Dropping In, For The Man Who Has Everything, Going Deep and Sexy Time – all crammed to the gills with high-powered new weapons, fresh vehicles and, above all, a sense of riotous abandon that we haven’t really seen from GTA since the latter stages of San Andreas back in 2004.

Last week, Rockstar visited our UK and US offices to show us the latest instalment of GTA IV's Xbox 360 exclusive DLC - The Ballad Of Gay Tony.

With less than a week to go before the long-awaited The Lost and Damned expansion for Grand Theft Auto IV hits Xbox Live, one question remains: what, if anything, will it bring to the multiplayer table? As it turns out, the DLC add-on will bolster its new, 22-mission single-player story with no fewer than six new modes (as well as a few old ones that’ll be spiked with TLAD’s biker flavor), all of which take advantage of Lost and Damned’s improved motorbike physics (read: it’s now much harder to fall off) and gritty new weapons.

Within five minutes of our hands-on with GTAIV’s long awaited DLC, The Lost and Damned we’ve already seen a cut-scene where a bloke’s shot in his back in broad daylight, a building gutted with a grenade-launcher for no reason and enough swears to make Chris Rock blush. “We’re going for a grittier theme this time around” we’re told by a Rockstar representative, and they’ve certainly achieved it.

Good things come to those who wait, but we’re getting more than a little impatient for any news on the first bits of downloadable content for Grand Theft Auto IV. Long talked about and promised in “autumn” of this year at one point, we’ve been eager to see anything about it this year, let alone play it.

Thought GTA IV’s multiplayer was just going to be bit of co-op? Think again. We counted ten different modes, including an explosive take on the Deathmatch blueprint, all packed with superb game options. Here are our good friends at Xbox World 360 UK, Tim Weaver and Rob Taylor, and their takes on four of the best game types they played.

GTA IV is a vast game, packed with detail. For every major set-piece, or game-defining mission, there are a thousand tiny things ticking away in the background, begging to be seen or explored. As in previous installments in the series, you could spend your whole time in the universe just moving about - there’s a sense of surrounding; a sense of time and place; a sense that around the next corner there’ll be something else to

While cruising the streets of "The LC" there's a lot more going on than just traffic, hookers, and the occasional drive by shooting. Like previous entries in the Grand Theft Auto series, tiny details are everywhere waiting to be discovered. And with GTA IV, the more compact game world allows for far more density of detail than any previous installment.

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