GTA4: the sons of anarchy edition
The lost and damned is part of the episodes of liberty city that follow Johnny Klebitz who is part of the The Lost Bike Gang. Its the same GTA4 gameplay with a few tweaks and new story but what it lacks is a strong story that the GTA series is extremely good at.
The lost and damned story was not as engaging as the second one. You are Johnny Klebitz the vice president of the lost gang who has been in charge of it. But now the original gang leader Billy is back and wants to go back to the roots of the Lost gang of being crazy. Tensions arises between the two and you do a bunch of missions. I wasn't that tied to the story as GTA4 (as a matter of fact i stopped playing LatD for a while till i came back and finished it). Johnny is also not a very appealing character and i didn't really care much for him. The one good thing i liked about the plot was that it intertwined with Niko's story give you a different perspective of the overall story. This is what DLC content should do and i'm glad Rockstar took that approach.
The gameplay is the same as GTA4 with a couple of tweaks. The biggest gain is that bikes are easier to handle and you don't fly off of it if you accidently hit a streetlight. Unfortunetely this tweak doesn't work in the original GTA so you can only play it under the Lost and Damned playthrough. There is also the whole notion of being in a gang where you and your gang members ride together and when you ride together you get more armor. Its a nice touch and i always made sure i would ride as a group when i went to certain missions. Your members also fight with you and if they die you don't have access to them, if they live they gain experience and can be used later. You also have access to backup and guns right from the get go. There are also new guns to the game but i ended up using my m4 all the time.
Graphics are essentially the same although there is this grainy filter but it didn't bother me too much. The game takes place most of the time in Alderney which was smart since in GTA4 it wasn't explored as much. The audio is the same with the exception of new music. I listen to rap so i listened most of the time to the rap station which had new segments by funkmaster flex and static selektah. What was cool was they had a segment where Busta Ryhmes called in and talked to Funkmaster flex. It sounded like a real rap radio station and i feel they should have more of that.
Overall if you are yearning for some new missions to play GTA4 then get this. But if you aren't a GTA4 fan or enjoyed just screwing around, this DLC won't help a lot. As far as story goes the lost and the damned is the weakest in the series, but its still one of the better games out there.
