Previews// GTA IV: The Lost and Damned

Some of my favourite modes come in the form of the unique new team options available to you.

Witness Protection pits two groups of players against each other. One is armed cops escorting a bus load of witnesses to specific locations on the map. The other is bikers that have to take out those witnesses at all costs.

It leads to all sorts of crazy situations, the most embarrassing for our team coming when our escorted bus keeled over at the start of the match, leaving the bikers an open chance to take us out. We survived though, you’ll be pleased to know, and won the match. Ha!

Lone Wolf Biker is probably my favourite multiplayer mode in The Lost and Damned; it's the simple game of tag taken into a sandbox world. One man is the Lone Wolf, and he must survive everyone else’s pain whilst meeting checkpoints to score big points.

If killed, his punisher becomes the next Lone Wolf and the cycle begins anew. You can imagine the carnage that can ensue when seven dudes with shotguns and miniguns all come trying to kill you, and end up killing each other in the process.

Although the bikes are integral to The Lost and Damned’s multiplayer, you are by no means limited to them, meaning you can hop off and pack some heat on foot, or switch to a police car and speed away from capture.

Knowing where to go or what to do isn’t a problem in these multiplayer modes either, because it’s all using GTA IV’s familiar HUD. The map of Liberty City stays the same, including the icons for enemies and the quickest route to your targets. Rockstar has nailed the presentation so that it’s in tune with GTA IV, but also so that playing a heated deathmatch never gets confusing in the vast open world.

The final match I played was a one-on-one deathmatch with a twist. Called Chopper vs Chopper, one player is a biker reaching checkpoints while the other takes control of a helicopter intent on blowing them sky high. This was fun to play for the sheer insanity of it all.

If you’ve flown a chopper in GTA IV before, you’ll know that it’s not exactly simple to control, and trying to shoot a tiny biker is like taking a minigun to a gnat. The only times I achieved success was by ramming my helicopter blades into my enemy rather than gunning him down. Hey, it’s a legitimate strategy!

One thing’s for sure though, is that the amount of fun I had with other attendees that day will be replicated by millions of Xbox owners worldwide when The Lost and Damned hits the Live Marketplace on February 17th. There are few times where downloadable content has actually brought fresh, new experiences to already released games, and Rockstar seems to have taken all the steps to make their first expansion a truly playable one. The wait, it appears, has been worth it.