Episodes from Liberty City Review
Great characters and excellent missions ensure that these episodes are well worth checking out.
Perhaps the biggest change to the gameplay of GTA 4 would be the inclusion of a checkpoint save system. Anytime you perish during a mission you can use your phone to bring yourself back to the last checkpoint. This can greatly reduce the travel times for longer missions when you make a silly mistake. For harder missions though it’s not a huge help because once you perish you lose all your armor and any ammo you used since the last checkpoint. If you keep repeating checkpoints you’ll just reduce your ammo to zero. So for the gunfights you’ll probably need to get some ammo and weapons anyway or just reload your last save.
Just like Little Jacob in GTA 4 Rockstar have assigned one of your friends in both episodes with a “gun van” that serves as ammunition shop called in a few blocks away. It is a pity however that there is a cool down associated with its use. Another change you don’t immediately notice is the fact that friends don’t call you much to “hang out” possibly related to having fewer friends in the episodes but still a big positive.
My RPG? No officer that was lying on the street before the car exploded
In continuing with the trend of Grand Theft Auto 4 the mission variety is good but it is the characters that keep the game fresh. It never fails to surprises me how far Rockstar pushes the stereotypes and in which directions. Great voice acting wouldn’t be as successful without the witty dialogue to match it. Both episodes together will probably take you around half the time it took to get through the GTA 4 main story. There are of course lots of little side missions to extend playtime including drug wars, gang wars, racing, parachuting, dancing and even golf.
Ballad of Gay Tony undoubtedly feels superior in terms of characters and missions but Lost should be completed first as it makes more sense from a connected story perspective. Ballad is also a longer game excluding the side missions. The performance of these new episodes is not much different from GTA 4 on the PC. The episodes do have far better looking shadows (also patched to GTA 4) so you are getting better visuals for the performance. If you enjoyed the great adventures in GTA 4 then these episodes will provide more then enough entertainment and are great value.
Our ratings for Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City on PC out of 100 (Ratings FAQ)
Performance
(Show PC Specs)
CPU: AMD Phenom II 955 @ 3.2GHz
GPU: Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1GB
RAM: 4GB DDR3
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
GPU: Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1GB
RAM: 4GB DDR3
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
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Jun 7, 2010 13:39:26 (Jun 7, 2010 13:39)
