The Lost and Damned packs alot of content, but the new point of view on Liberty City and the story, make it a must play.
In The Lost and Damned, you play as Johnny Klebitz, the vice president of the Lost biker gang, who you might remember from the original Grand Theft Auto IV, if you just payed attention.
The story begins, when Billy Grey, the leader of The Lost is released from prison, and he comes back leading the biker gang.
The story might not pull you in from the very start, but it comes interesting as the story moves on, and things start going to hell.
As for the new gameplay features, well, there's not much, but doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing. Sure, you will notice that the difficulty has been adjusted, and it might feel a little too hard at first, especially you haven't played GTA IV in the last few months. The gameplay is still solid, and feels rewarding. The game is quite lengthy, packing around 8 hours of gameplay, of course depending what kind of gamer you are.
Something that's new and very welcome addition to the missions, is the fact that there are checkpoints. You won't really get that same kind of frusturation you might have had in the past with the original GTA IV, where you had to say, chase someone a hundred miles, and after this you're caught in a firefight and the last guy kills you just when you're about to kill him, but you had to reload and he shoots you, and then you'll have to do it all again.
There's new weaponary, minigames / activities, soundtrack, new cars and most noticeably the increased ammount of bikes, which makes sense of course since you'll be riding your bike pretty much 60% of the time you're in a vehicle of any kind. There's less variety than in the original game, where you went flying, running, boating and car chasing, but this time around the game is built around the bikes.
You might remember from Niko's adventures, that bikes were a little hard to handle at times, especially at high speeds, and you went flying out of the window pretty easy, but thankfully, this has been changed. The bikes are much easier and fun to control now, and it's almost hard to fall off your bike now. Rockstar also gave this tweak an excuse, saying that Johnny, as he's more experienced as a biker than Niko, he can handle the choppers alot better.
Sadly, with all the new content added, very little of the content can be linked, almost none to either game, the original and the DLC that is. You can't enter the buildings you explore in the original game, or most of them atleast and you can't access the new buildings and weaponary introduced in The Lost and Damned when you're playing as Niko.
Speaking of Niko, there are a few missions where you and Johnny go together, which you may remember from the original game. Niko isn't the only familiar face in TLAD, but I won't spoil the rest of it for you. You'll just have to play it yourself.
As for the voice acting, and visuals, nothing has really changed. The visuals are the same, except for the added film grain filter, which fits the game.. well, sort of, but it can be also be turned on or off, making it pretty much your call which way you like it.
I personally dont feel that the visuals are any bad, even though some might say, "Hey, it's like an year old dude." It's certainly one of the better looking games for the consoles, especially when you look it in the visuals / performance / console point of view.
And when I say that nothing in voice acting hasn't changed, that's positive. The voice acting is great, from the beginning to the end, and it feels that the voice actors really got into their characters.
The coolest part about The Lost and Damned is propably the links given between all the new characters. This makes the game feel like there's a story behind every character in Liberty City. There are so many interesting characters, that you just wish that you could play all of those characters, and experience their background story. It makes the Liberty City even more immersive place than the Liberty City you experienced before when you were playing as Niko Bellic. Now, the world just sucks you in.
Overall, The Lost and Damned is certainly worth the 1600 Microsoft Points, which is around 20 euros ( or dollars ), and it's actually a very good reason to buy a copy of GTA IV again, if you've sold it in the past once already. It's a great DLC, and I'd actually like to call it a game itself, since it packs so many missions, alot of gameplay and content for a price so cheap.
-Jarno 'Jankka' Vihonen