Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City Super Review

The story’s consistently compelling, but that doesn’t mean it always makes sense. It’s not always clear why Johnny commits certain crimes or kills certain people, and his ideals (and apparently diplomatic pre-game disposition) often go out the window if it suits a mission’s setup. It’s like Rockstar has mastered the art of creating sympathetic, world-weary criminals, but hasn’t quite figured out how to make that jibe with the mass murder and indiscriminate mayhem that GTA missions call for.

Story and missions and their occasional contradictions aside, The Lost and Damned brings a lot of new stuff to Liberty City. There’s no new island, although there are some new building interiors to explore (like the Lost clubhouse), and you’ll also have a few cool new weapons to play around with, including pipe bombs, a machine pistol, a grenade launcher and the monstrous “street sweeper,” an assault shotgun that fires shells at a rate of about six per second.

Being an American citizen, Johnny has the entirety of Liberty City open to him from the start (regardless of how far you’ve made it in Niko’s story). He also has his own friends, whom he can call up for the usual social activities (eating, bowling, going to see a show), as well as a few new ones (air hockey, arm wrestling and awful hi-lo card games). They almost never call him, though, which is great. Johnny doesn’t date, either, so don’t bother trying to scour Lovemeet or Craplist for new girlfriends.

If socializing with imaginary people isn’t your thing, the optional gang wars (which are really more like turf battles) and Road Rash-inspired races (in which you clobber opponents with a baseball bat) might be more your speed. They’re joined by new TV shows, websites, radio content (with new songs and new DJs, including Funkmaster Flex) and performances by stand-up comic Frankie Boyle. And if you’re still not satisfied, you can hunt down the game’s 50 hidden seagulls, assuming you’re some kind of masochist.

Bring your friends

And, of course, there’s multiplayer. The Lost and Damned brings no fewer than nine modes to accompany its single-player campaign, six of which are completely new. Of these, the most fun is easily Witness Protection, which tasks one team (the Lost) with murdering state’s witnesses before the other team (the SWAT-like NOoSE agents) can transport them to safety in an armored bus. Running a close second is the Race mode, which is just a multiplayer take on the clobber-happy Road Rash races of the single-player game.

Lone Wolf Biker is a hellish game of tag for up to 16 crazed bikers, Own the City tasks players with taking over patches of turf (which are then defended by computer-controlled guards) and Club Business is a biker-flavored take on the main game’s objective-based Mafiya Work mode. Finally, Chopper vs Chopper is an insane, two-man cat-and-mouse game between a lone motorcyclist and the pilot of a heavily armed attack helicopter. It’s fun, especially if you’re good at piloting the game’s choppers and only have one friend to play with.

Considering what it offers forits price(about $20, if you split the cost of the Episodes disc two ways)it’s impossible to give The Lost and Damned anything but a full recommendation. The story and acting are great, the missions are enjoyable and riding around on the retooled bikes is the most fun it’s been in any GTA since Vice City. It’s not going to change the minds of any Niko-haters, and it's easily the most depressing of the three chapters, but anyone with a high tolerance for bleakness and biker violence will want to dive in.