Skill Points
You begin the game with five skill points (SP). Skill points are used to upgrade your abilities, weapons, and vehicles. The SP upgrades can be found in your Profile menu—Skills is the first menu option. When you run out of SP you need to convert diamonds into SP, and if you don’t have any to convert, in-app purchases come into play. You can buy bundles that contain varying amounts of diamonds (50 to 1,560) for up to $99.99! Ouch. It’s best to be patient and find ways in-game to earn diamonds and cash.
Cash and Diamonds
Most everything in the game that is purchasable is paid for with diamonds. You earn cash and diamonds through normal game progression. Cash can be converted to diamonds in the shop.
Upgrades
Weapons and vehicles have three upgrade levels. A weapon becomes more powerful (does more damage, carries more ammo, has a faster reload time, holds more ammo, and has a faster rate of fire) each time it’s upgraded to the next level. Melee weapon upgrades do nothing but improve the aesthetic value; they do not affect performance. Vehicle upgrades improve top speed, acceleration, and durability and give you more paint-job options.
Mission Types
To earn cash and diamonds, you should partake in all the mission types. Keep in mind there are level restrictions as you progress, so completing various mission types is necessary—it’s not possible to stick to just one mission type and see it to the end without playing the other types.
Assassination
Fight your way to a well-defended target and either intimidate or kill your prey. You typically have to fight through many guards to get to the target and to get away from the area to complete the mission.
Assault
This mission type involves completely ridding an area of all enemies. There are many stages to this kind of mission, and more enemies will spawn or roll in to challenge you in the next stage. Once all the stages of battle are complete the mission is won.
Fight to a Target
This mission style is very similar to the assault mission type, except once you’ve battled your way to the target you need to plant a bomb or interact with something in the environment to finish the job.
Chase
A chase mission involves you pursuing a vehicle while maintaining a certain distance from the vehicle. If you get too far away, you are given 15 seconds to reenter the zone to continue the mission. Get outside of the zone for too long and you fail. Depending on the mission objective, chase missions require you to either stay with the vehicle to the end and fight the enemy after exiting vehicles or to just destroy the vehicle during the pursuit.
Diversions
Call them side missions, distractions, or diversions, these missions fall outside task-driven missions. These challenges range from races to gambling. They appear as orange icons in the mission list in Quick Play and on the map.
Survival
This is a capture-the-flag-type challenge. You’re required to defeat waves of enemies while being restricted to a preset zone, marked with a large yellow glowing ribbon. Step outside the zone and you have 10 seconds to return or fail. At times you need to step out to pick up dropped ammo from the fallen. You can purchase ammo and med-kits during the challenge.
Heist
Similar to when you robbed the casino with Karen in the beginning of the game, heists involve finding and killing the building manager to get the keys to the register, safe, or vault and then defending the location of the money from waves of enemies trying to stop the heist. Once out, you need to lose the cops and return to your stash location to complete the job.
Carnage
Eliminate as many targets as possible in the given amount of time. Typically, you are given three minutes and have a choice of weapons to start with before the challenge begins. During the challenge you can obtain a vehicle to make you more resistant to the enemies shooting back at you. You can run over targets and perform drive-bys to take out a greater number of targets.
Delivery
Pick up a vehicle and deliver illegal packages to drop locations in a set amount of time. You must exit your vehicle at the drop locations to successfully deliver the goods.
Time Attack
These are street races involving a certain number of laps around a predetermined course around Vegas. Come in first to win.
Ring Challenge
This race-type challenge involves driving through all the yellow rings on the course while leaving as much time as possible on the clock at the end of the challenge. The faster you drive through all the rings the better your score. The red rings make the challenge more difficult, as they take five seconds off your time for each one you pass through. Yellow rings add five seconds.
Freefall
This is a skydiving challenge where you jump from a plane and maneuver through the target rings, which are floating in the sky and arranged in a descending path to the ground. You can choose to pull your parachute when you feel it necessary to slow down, but you have to purchase parachutes (in this game nothing seems to be free), and using one slows you down to the point where you may fail the challenge. The idea is to get through as many rings as you can in a small amount of time for the high score. Tilt up to slow down and tilt down to speed up (with or without the parachute).
Racing
Race around a preset course around Vegas and beat the competition to the finish line. You must also beat the target time to win; even if you come in first, you could end up losing the challenge. On the flip side, you could come in second and still pass the mission—it’s all about beating the different stages of time to win the associated prize and not so much beating the competitors.
Brawl
This is a hand-to-hand fight with a number of opponents. Take out waves of opponents as quickly as possible. This diversion is similar to Frank’s mission, Eye for an Eye.