Unlike Niko, Johnny has a gang that he rolls with throughout his missions in The Lost and the Damned
Several of you are aware of my chagrin about having to play The Lost and the Damned during a time when Mass Effect 2 is out, but I made it through the expansion this past weekend and am ready to share my slightly subjective review on it. While this expansion was released on the 360 about a year ago, it was just recently announced that it would be released on the PS3 and the PC in the coming months so perhaps this is a good time to review it now that I’ve noticed that we are getting more PS3 owners (welcome!) here at Leveling Down.
NOTE: I am playing The Lost and the Damned off the retail disc, Grand Theft Auto IV: Episodes from Liberty City, which does not require the original GTAIV disc to play. I will be getting through The Ballad of Gay Tony and reviewing that hopefully in the near future.
Initial Impressions
The first thing that happened when I started playing the Lost and the Damned was that I felt like I was in some sort of gaming bizarro world. I had just finished playing Bayonetta, a game that was probably the closest to gameplay nirvana I had encountered in quite some time, but with a storyline and plot worth completely forgetting. Lost and the Damned was practically the opposite. As I started playing this expansion, I felt like the gameplay was just flat out bland and boring, yet the storyline and cutscenes were really drawing me in.
In The Lost and the Damned, you take on the role of Johnny Klebitz, vice president of The Lost motorcycle gang. The story opens with Billy Grey, the gang’s president, getting out of prison and retaking leadership from Johnny. While Billy was in prison, Johnny was acting president and negotiated all sorts of deals and arrangements in order for The Lost gang to “flourish”. However, when Billy comes back and reclaims the leadership of the gang, a lot of friction occurs as Billy wants to go back to the wild and crazy ways of not thinking about consequences to his actions. This power struggle between Johnny and Billy is the heart of the main plot for the expansion, and it’s got quite a hook.
Midway Through
I was getting pretty drawn into the storyline, except I kept getting taken out with the amount of noise my 360 was making reading everything off the disc for The Lost and the Damned. This was a new Jasper 360 model, and it is the kind that is amazingly quiet. When I played Bayonetta, I didn’t hear the 360 make a peep. But with Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City, the 360 was sounding like a launch unit – basically an airplane taking off over and over again. I was scared that the disc drive laser would unalign over the amount of work it had to do, so I finally ended up installing it onto the hard drive. Problem solved. This was the first 360 disc I’ve played on my 360 Jasper where it looked like it was really strained playing the game off the disc. However, even after installing the game to disc, I came across a peeve several times throughout the game: textures just weren’t loading fast enough in Liberty City’s world as I traveled through it. Often times I would find myself traveling through an empty block of land before it suddenly got populated with the street, cars, buildings, and people around me. It was especially annoying in races, when there would be walls that you’d crash into because they wouldn’t load before you saw them.
With regards to the story, it got both better and worse as I made my way through the expansion. The better aspect was that several of the missions Johnny takes are linked to missions in the original GTA IV game. In fact, you cross paths with Niko Belic a few times, and I loved it, as I am certainly a fan of Niko with his head-bobbing walk and accent. The storyline and plot were really good up to about halfway through, but then for some reason or another it just gets poorly told after that. I don’t want to ruin the plot, but once I got about halfway through I started to notice that loose ends started showing up, which had me questioning why or how certain things were happening in the storyline.
With the storyline starting to flounder, it’s not the gameplay that will save this expansion. The GTA games are not exactly known for their strong gameplay, but rather, the freedom to do pretty crazy stuff. Otherwise, most of this expansion’s missions simply revolve around driving somewhere and killing some people. The combat system is passable, but compared to other 3rd person games like Gears of War and Lost Planet, Grand Theft Auto IV’s engine just ain’t the best for combat.
The Lost and the Damned include some extra non-campaign modes such as motorcycle racing and gang wars, but for me I’ve never been a big fan of these side-quest type things that don’t have any sort of plot element attached to them. (For me, my enjoyment with Grand Theft Auto IV has always been about how the missions evolve the plot.) Motorcycle racing allows you to race for money throughout Liberty City, but all the racers get to actually hold bats to knock each other off, like the classic Road Rash games of my youth. Gang Wars is basically just you grabbing some gang members and heading to an area to kill everyone from a rival gang. It’s honestly very similar to any mission you’ll play in the game, but of course, there’s no advancement in the plot after you complete a gang war.
Final Thoughts
For longtime readers of Leveling Down, you know the type of games I enjoy most: games with an engrossing storyline and excellent gameplay. The Lost and The Damned starts out with quite the engrossing storyline, but starts tripping up about half way through (although the final mission is pretty sweet). GTA IV’s gameplay was never my real cup of tea. It lets kids have fun jacking cars and running over people, but it doesn’t have the tightness that many other action games this generation provide.
This review created some disparity in my head, as I gave Grand Theft Auto IV an A but am feeling more annoyed with The Lost and the Damned’s game mechanics today yet for the most part they are the same game mechanics I played in GTAIV. Maybe GTA IV just hasn’t aged as well, because when I think about it, I don’t know if I’d give GTA IV an A if I were to play through it again today. Still, this subject of “aging game scores” shouldn’t really be the focus of this game’s review, and I will leave it for another time. If you’re playing The Lost and the Damned today, just be ready for the fact that it might not be all that, even with last year’s reviews all practically giving the expansion high marks.
I’ll leave you all with the fact that while I was willing to forgive various shortcomings of the original GTA IV game, I’m not so much with the expansion. Now that GTA IV’s price has pretty much dropped to $20, I feel like The Lost and the Damned $20 price tag is affecting my review score for the game more than it should. At $20, I cannot recommend anyone to get it unless you’re just a super die-hard GTA IV fan that needs to get more out of it. If it were $5-$10, I would definitely recommend it, as it fits the role of a true expansion to the game: letting you experience the world of Grand Theft Auto IV through a different character with new missions and minor gameplay additions. Unfortunately, the expansion is only a few hours long, and the actual gameplay elements in these missions is quite repetitive (drive somewhere, shoot some people). I’m not exactly looking forward to playing The Ballad of Gay Tony if it’s just like The Lost and the Damned, but who knows – maybe I will be surprised.
Review Score: C+
I found that Niko’s story kinda went sour in the second half as well. I hated riding bikes in the original, which is one reason why I passed on TLATD. Is it improved at all?
i didn’t use bikes too much in the original so i can’t say for sure, but i heard that the bikes are improved in TLATD. Were there “chopper” style Harley bikes in the original? Because they handle a bit better than the japanese “hairdryers” (what the Lost gang refers to them as) and are harder for you to get thrown off.
Non-motorcyclists would presume not falling off instantly should equate to a “better” motorcycle, however as with many aspects of gaming the application of practice and the acquisition of experience amount to an increased aptitude in said activity and thus equate an overall improvement enjoyment.