The Importance of Brotherhood

Having already shown us Liberty City through the eyes of an outsider trying to carve out a piece for himself in Grand Theft Auto IV, Rockstar North now gives us a view of this troubled metropolis from the perspective of someone with a history there and something to lose in The Lost and Damned. This is the first piece of downloadable content for GTA4, and despite some gameplay tweaks and technical adjustments, it's still a fairly typical GTA experience. In all I found it to be a pretty terrific companion piece to the grander story of GTA4, one that's leaner and more focused, and better for it.

The Lost and Damned puts you in the patched-up leather jacket of Johnny Klebitz vice president of the Alderney chapter of The Lost. A minor threat in GTA4, The Lost is a stereotypical biker gang that can't quite seem to reconcile its past as a rowdy fraternity of road-loving, authority-hating outsiders, and its present as a murderous and ambitious criminal enterprise. While the price of revenge was the underlying theme for Niko Bellic's story, Johnny wrestles with his loyalties to The Lost, and the price you pay when you choose to call the wrong men "brother." It's a pretty heavy main story, but there's a genuine camaraderie between the brothers that gives it some warmth. As usual, it's the strength of the voice actors portraying the procession of thieves, murderers, and degenerates in The Lost and Damned that help Rockstar North sell its weird blend of hard-boiled criminal melodrama and blunt pop-culture satire.

Johnny Klebitz was a minor character in Niko Bellic's journey through Liberty City, playing supporting roles in a botched heroin deal and a botched diamond deal in Grand Theft Auto IV. Similarly, Niko is a bit player in The Lost and Damned, with his and Johnny's stories mostly running in parallel. The two tales occasionally interweave in some fun and unexpected ways, though without getting too weirdly serendipitous about it. Other supporting characters from GTA4 play a more prominent role here as well, giving you a more fleshed-out perspective of Liberty City's underword. Still, this is Johnny's story, and though he's not as conflicted as Niko, Rockstar adds enough unique depth to the stock biker persona to establish a character you can really sympathize with. Unlike Niko, Johnny's never presented with difficult moral decisions--it's a pretty straight journey from beginning to end, and while he ends up taking a lot of orders from people he probably shouldn't, he still manages not to come off as too much of a simp.

While the internal and external strife of The Lost accounts for much of the drama in Johnny's life, it's not all bad, and it affords him some perks that Niko didn't earn until relatively late in the game in GTA4. Almost right from the start, Johnny can call on his brothers to deliver him motorcycles or show up around the corner with a van full of deep-discount guns and ammo. He can call for backup pretty much whenever he needs it, and the more often he calls on his brothers, the tougher they get. Then there's the chapter clubhouse in Alderney, where Johnny can lay his head, play a little hi-lo, do some arm-wrestling, shoot pool, watch TV, surf the Internet, and store whatever vehicles he might pick up while out and about.

The tradeoff for the support system that The Lost provides Johnny is that he doesn't get to live the big baller lifestyle that Niko could eventually adopt. Aside from the clubhouse, the only other house Johnny can gain access to through the story is a trashy hideout in a crummy, industrial part of Alderney. The clothes, the women, the socializing--these don't play the same role here as they did in GTA4, and really, it makes sense for the character. The relative working-class nature of Johnny's reality is reflected in the missions you'll take on, too. With rare exception, the game is meant to be played from on top of a motorcycle, and the missions never explicitly involve helicopters or boats. I was a bit concerned about the whole motorcycle thing, since the bikes always seemed incredibly squirrely in GTA4, but the sturdy choppers that The Lost and Damned surrounds you with have a much more manageable profile than the so-called “hair driers” that were so prominent before.

Despite all these little tweaks and changes, the mission structure in The Lost and Damned is pretty typical GTA. After a cutscene of some crazy criminal telling you what crazy criminal act they need performed, you drive to a location, where, more often than not, the criminal act goes sour, requiring you to either engage in a shootout or a high-speed-chase-slash-shootout. Like GTA4 proper, The Lost and Damned would've benefitted from more liberal checkpointing. It's supremely frustrating to make your way through most of a multipart mission only to get gunned down right near the end, forcing you to do the whole thing over again, but the missions here seem a lot shorter, so the do-overs aren't as time-consuming. In all it took me a good eight hours or so to play through the main story in The Lost and Damned, and I barely scratched the surface on the motorcycle races, gang wars, and bike theft side missions.

Adding to the atmosphere of Liberty City are some new radio DJs and music, as well as a new comedy club performance by comic Frankie Boyle that I found surprisingly funny. Other than that comedy bit, the new media stuff in The Lost and Damned didn't really leap out at me, largely because it's mixed in with the already plentiful material from GTA4. Similarly, I noticed a few technical changes while playing The Lost and Damned. However, having not played GTA4 for a few months, it's hard for me to say are part of the DLC and not a general patch. Either way, the frame rate seems markedly improved over what GTA4 shipped with, offering a much smoother ride, even though the atmospheric effects seem as heavy as ever. The change I really appreciated, though, was the way the default camera angle when you're in a vehicle is pitched up slightly, making it easier to see stuff that's immediately in front of you.

GTA4 was the first in the series to introduce a multiplayer component, but I wasn't terribly impressed by what I saw, and thus didn't spend a whole lot of time with it. The Lost and Damned introduces a bunch of new multiplayer modes that appear to be just retooled versions of the existing GTA4 modes, though for whatever reason I found them much more interesting.

It's still hindered by some of the gameplay frustrations inherent to GTA4, but The Lost and Damned sees Rockstar North doing what it does best--telling personal criminal tales in a vivid, hyper-real world. I was initially a little skeptical of the GTA4 DLC taking the focus away from Niko Bellic, but after The Lost and Damned, I'm definitely ready for more Liberty City side stories.