GTAIV: The Lost and Damned

Witness Protection is another team event. It casts one side as N.O.O.S.E. agents, dropping off prisoners at various police stations around the city, while the other team plays as the Lost, with the charmingly straightforward task of killing everyone instead. It's a simple game, with the slow chug of the police van (driven by a randomly selected player) setting the pace. But the chaos as waves of attacking Lost skirmish with N.O.O.S.E agents in squad cars often erupts outwards for several blocks in every direction, promising that even if you lose your way and can't catch up with the main event, there's still plenty of radiating violence to get stuck into.

Elsewhere, Lone Wolf Biker provides an explosive study in victimisation: one player becomes the target, and everyone else has to take him out. Whoever does – whether by bullet, pipe-bomb, or a good honest school bus through the brain – then becomes the target themselves, and the chase continues.

This is just the kind of inspired cruelty Rockstar is made for. Lone Wolf Biker takes the roles of griefer and griefee and knots them together so tightly that, in the inevitable cluster of violent role-reversals that marks each game, each moment of victory swiftly turns into blind panic, as the entire hunt pack descends. The game also serves as an insight into just how carefully Rockstar puts together its chaos and keeps it stoked over the course of a long round, whether it's in the ten seconds of invulnerability after you become the target, which allows you to scrape together the barest of strategies, or the way in which the checkpointed path you then have to follow constantly doubles back on itself, ensuring that even the most incompetent straggler will accidentally back themselves into the action every few minutes.

Finally, Chopper vs Chopper is a straightforward game of one-on-one, with a single malicious twist: one of the choppers is a helicopter. Once again, the biker moves between checkpoints, while the chopper pilot has to try and take him out, and the resulting bloodbath is a deft balance of vulnerable manoeuvrability on the streets and heavily-armed klutzishness in the sky.

So the Lost and Damned provides a smart range of modes, but will it be enough? Despite the clever variety that the original game's multiplayer offered, and the fairly large audience who takes to its streets weekly, it's hard to argue that GTA IV has had the same success with online multiplayer as Halo or Gears or Call of Duty has had. Perhaps that's down to the series' over-powering focus on the single-player game - or, more likely, the inherent nature of sandbox titles, which often give you ample opportunity to carry out all sorts of extra-curricular screwing around without even leaving the campaign mode. Whatever the reason may be, if you do choose to explore the other, more populated, side of Liberty City this time around, you'll likely find the same wit and care that characterises the story mode. And you won't have to spend a few hours learning the new maps, either.