Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City are the two pieces of story DLC from Grand Theft Auto IV combined and released as a standalone package. It reuses all the assets from the main game such as the city and combat mechanics. Both of them follow a different protagonist but occurs during the same time as Grand Theft Auto IV and even with a few intersecting missions. As well as new story content, there are various other additions such as new radio stations, new weapons, new vehicles and new activities to do. The first DLC is called The Lost and Damned and follows Johnny Klebitz, who is a member of the biker gang The Lost. It begins when the President of the gang, Billy, is released from rehabilitation and regains leadership over the gang.
Billy is a lot more hot headed, rash and stubborn. Johnny tries to convince him that some of his actions are not good ideas but is forced to go along with them anyway. Naturally, this means that eventually, something will happen to Billy as a type of karma. The Lost and Damned tells a more focused story surrounding Johnny and the loyalty of the gang being tested. There are a few shared missions with Niko's story, with a lot of supporting characters making an appearance. As Johnny is a part of the biker gang, a lot of the missions and his preferred method of transport involves a bike. Unfortunately, the handling of bikes in the game is the worse out of all the vehicles, with wide turns when you are at high speed and just makes it somewhat annoying.
With the main transport being bikes, it does seem that traffic density is lower and it is not as easy to be thrown off your bike as Niko was. Interestingly, the game feels like it had an orange filter applied to it during daytime. There are 22 missions in the story and will take around 5-8 hours to complete. That being said, the things you do in the missions are the same as the things you did in Niko's story. It doesn't add anything new but still quite a lot of fun to play. Gang Wars in which Johnny targets and kills opposing gangs, as well as Bike Races are introduced to lengthen the play time.
The second DLC is The Ballad of Gay Tony and follows Luis Fernando Lopez, an assistant/partner to nightclub owner Tony Prince. Like all the other characters in Grand Theft Auto IV, Tony is a lost cause, being involved in drugs, money laundering and the like. Tony gets himself into all sorts of trouble including taking out loans with people he shouldn't have. Thus Luis will have to sort out his mess and this quickly escalates to Luis helping out this person and then that person etc. After the focused story of The Lost and Damned, it's a lot more undefined here and the narrative suffers. However, this DLC covers off the final viewpoint in a key mission from the core game and it is insightful.
The Ballad of Gay Tony has 26 story missions, taking around 5-10 hours to complete. A new feature is the score you get at the end of each mission, with certain criteria to tick off in order to get 100%. These include time it took to finish the mission, damage taken, headshots etc. If you used a cheat code, or perhaps more annoyingly, used a taxi, during the mission, it invalidates your score. The missions are a bit more action oriented but unlike the missions from the core game or The Lost and Damned, they have a tendency to force you to waste time driving to the destination and not allowing you to take a taxi to fast travel.
Even worse is that a number of missions force you to use the helicopter. The helicopter controls remain horrendous, with one mission forcing you to chase enemies on boats and shooting them down. It is annoyingly frustrating purely because of the crappy controls. When will the developers realize that the handling of all the vehicles in the game is NOT FUN when you are forced to race or tail someone because they are not tight enough. Other additions include even more minigames (golf, cage fighting, dancing etc), parachuting and Drug Wars, which are yet again basically short missions where you defeat all enemies, stealing vehicles or obtaining items.
The core concept and controls in the DLC remain the same as Grand Theft Auto IV. There are no new combat mechanics. Therefore, the characters can shoot, punch, jump and take cover. The game uses an auto-targeting system and you can still wreck havoc in Liberty City. You will attract the attention of the police if you're seen performing crime, with varying Wanted Levels. Each successive level will cause the police to use more resources to capture you.
All the flaws from the core game is still here from the heavy vehicles that can't make turns at high speed (and tendency to flip over), repetitive mission design and sidequests, and a choppy story at times. Overall, Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City is a great supplement to the core game, fleshing out some of the background of key events. As DLC, they are pretty good value wiht at least 10 hours of story content plus all the additional side content. As a standalone game though, you won't get as much enjoyment since you won't recognize all the cameos.
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