Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned
Rockstar Games
Rockstar North
360
US Release: Out Now
UK Release: Out Now
Screenshot Gallery

If The Lost And The Damned were a TV broadcast, it would “contain very strong language and scenes of violence from the start”.

Billy, leader of biker gang The Lost and free at last after a stint in rehab, isn’t happy with how player character Johnny Klebitz, aka Johnny The Jew, has been running things in his absence. Your entrepreneurial upstart has signed a truce with arch rivals the Angels Of Death, and settling the matter means a barrage of profanities so extreme as to make Killzone sound like Cliff Richard’s answering machine.

Oh, and a bullet between the eyes of the first available Angel. “The Almighty forgives,” reminds Billy. “The Lost don’t.”

So begins some DLC concerned less with things than people and events. There are a few new dots on the map and new weapons too, among them a grenade launcher and rapid-fire shotgun. And being a tale told largely on two wheels, of course there are new bikes. As an increasingly anxious Johnny, you start the game with a growling behemoth of a ride better suited to Batman than Dennis Hopper. Slow in the turn but strong in a crash, it’s a beast designed to last throughout a game a third as long as GTAIV.

It’s also the inspiration for a new downtime distraction called Convoy mode, in which keeping up with the pack grants incidental rewards. Stay within the chevron moving on the road and you’re within earshot of your fellow riders, the game responding with on-mission dialogue.

Push up on the D-pad and a series of energy bars appears, in this case gauging each gang-member’s ‘battle-readiness’. Defend them in battle and listen to them en route and the bars rise; ignore such rules of the road and they drop. Let a man die and their replacement starts at the bottom.

In a game which is ostensibly more of the same, the gang itself is the most interesting character. Johnny might be a new asset complete with fresh animations for all his states, not to mention an established player rather than a fresh-off-the-boat prospector, but he and Nico Bellic act like cousins. And not particularly distant ones, either.

It’s his relationship with wildman Billy, as dysfunctional as any in the series, that truly sets him apart. He might be the stuff of free-spirited road movies, but Hunter S Thompson would have plenty to say about his friend.

The three missions we’re shown occur at a point at which the gang is still amicable, its war with the Angels making up for lost time. The first, Action/Reaction, involves chasing down the witnesses to the murderous opening act.

Another, Buyer’s Market, sees the story criss-cross that of Nico’s, characters old and new jostling for screen time. Billy might live for speed but his latest vice is heroin, an impromptu hand-off dropping you right in the lap of an LCPD task force. It’s left to the next mission, Shifting Weight, to chronicle your escape, the ensuing on-rails bike chase giving MGS4 a run for its money.

Helicopters, squad cars, riot vans and Hummers are all seen off as you judder through the city’s tightest spaces. It’s enough to suggest a ‘bigger, faster, more’ expansion that isn’t without personality. Shameless nods to Terminator 2 – anything, in fact, combining handlebars and heavy weapons – occur in the same universe as GTAs III and IV, the cameos coming thick and fast.

But while the shorter running time and fresh story will undoubtedly suit those who couldn’t endure the complete GTAIV, this isn’t an olive branch to errant fans. If the rigid, more believable underworld of Bellic and co left you cold, this burning rubber will do little to raise the heat.