Insurance Fraud (Angel’s Arc)
Cash Earned: $2,000
Respect Earned: 200
Unlocks: Additional Insurance Fraud Activities
Rewards: 2% Luchadores District Control—$79 per hour
Activity Objectives: Earn $80,000 in insurance settlements in 3:30
Ambulance Chaser
Go to Angel’s rundown casino to meet the self loathing wrestler. He lives a rough lifestyle to stay focused and to be reminded of what Killbane took from him. Angel wants to harden you up to take on the Luchadores. His philosophy is that by experiencing the worst pain imaginable you will become chiseled out of diamond and be tough enough to take on Killbane.
The first of six activities of this nature, Insurance Fraud is a great and fun way to abuse both the twisted legal realities of Steelport, and the physics of the game. The basics are simple. Use the controls to help ragdoll yourself into any and all oncoming vehicles, and while in midair, use the analog sticks to guide yourself into more oncoming vehicles to add to the painful combo.
It is important to ragdoll yourself wisely, because it takes time to recover regardless of whether you’ve been hit by a car, and you’re on the clock.
Every Insurance Fraud activity has specially marked bonus zones, typically in places where traffic at an intersection is heaviest. Take advantage of this to build your adrenaline meter. With that full, you can steer yourself in midair to a much greater degree, and chain some seriously nasty hits.
Keep in mind that the bonus zones are not permanent; they can fade after a certain amount of money has been made inside of them. While in this first Insurance Fraud activity you might be able make the limit in the first zone you visit, later activities will require significantly more money to complete. You have to maximize profit in each zone, and waste as little time as possible.
It can be surprisingly easy to make the required $80,000 in this activity. Start off by going to the closest bonus zone, taking a car there to give you the maximum amount of time to abuse yourself. Once there, park your car on the sidewalk so it does not impede street traffic, as you want the cars to pass through the intersection at full speed.
Now, wait for cars to come at you, and ragdoll into them. If you’re lucky, you can guide yourself in the air to another waiting vehicle, which further compounds the money value of the hit.
The other bonus zone is a bit farther, however. It is at the mouth of one of the highway bridges leading to the western island. This is where the real money is!
Now, charge, on foot, into the oncoming traffic coming off the freeway.
The vehicles will be moving at great speed, so the potential for something hilarious and profitable is high here.
Trail Blazing (Angel’s Arc)
Cash Earned: $2,000
Respect Earned: 200
Unlocks: Additional Trail Blazing activities
Rewards: 1% Luchadores district control—$58 per hour
Activity Objectives: Reach six checkpoints in 30 seconds
Burn Rubber and Everything Else
Angel believes you are still not a bad enough dude to handle the Luchadores, so he has a special training session in mind for you. Equipping you with a heat-resistant space suit, and sticking you on a quad bike that trails hot flame as you drive it, he wants you to drive through the streets and cause as much havoc as possible.
The objective is to get through all the checkpoints in the time allotted, including any bonus time you earn. You have a small starting time limit that can increase by driving through cars . . .
. . . and people.
You can improve your destructive ride through the city by picking up small patches of flames, which literally become homing missiles that rip apart clusters of vehicles you miss running into.
Each instance of Trail Blazing works on a checkpoint system but there is a lot of space to play in. Each checkpoint is marked by arrows that basically tell you what direction you should travel in to get to the next checkpoint. Once you get to a checkpoint in this mode, you get your time bonus, and it is reset to zero, meaning you must keep up the destruction between checkpoints if you want to have enough time to reach the end.
You should make a serious effort to hit clusters of people. This can be difficult as sidewalk obstacles, combined with the impact of the bodies, can slow you down and knock you off course and into a wall, but the time bonus you get from hitting pedestrians is higher than what you get hitting cars. Any time you see a cluster of people, go for it!
As these races take place in the city, you have many side routes you can take to reach some of the check points, which can reward you with more flame missiles that hit more targets.
For this first race, you can find many alleys and side streets between the third, fourth, and fifth checkpoints, respectively, but you can still reach the goal in this and all other Trail Blazer activities by sticking to the main guide path. Take the time to hit as many targets as possible.
Eye of the Tiger (Angel’s Arc)
Cash Earned: $2,000
Respect Earned: 200
Unlocks: Additional Tiger Escort Activities; New Homie—Angel De LaMuerte
Rewards: 2% Luchadores District Control—$67 per hour
Activity Objectives: Fill the courage gauge while minimizing animal rage
Tiger Tactics
Angel has decided that you are still not tough enough to take on the top man of the Luchadores, which should have you wondering exactly what kind of monster you’re gunning for. You need to learn how to overcome true fear to stand a chance. Conveniently enough, he has a pet tiger for you to drive around town for a little while.
Driving a tiger around requires you to keep moving to please it, which will fill your courage meter. Drive fast, so that the animal rage bar does not begin to fill up.
If you slow down, stop, or hit other vehicles, the rage bar will fill up. Animal rights activists’ vans will be chasing you around, similar to the Escort activities’ TV vans, and being in their vicinity will cause the rage bar to fill up even faster than usual.
Complicating all this is the fact that you have a flipping tiger in the car next to you. Being a tiger, he will paw at you at random, causing you to swerve violently to one side or the other. At high speeds, this can become a real tragedy real fast. It also means you will find that no street, no matter how straight and wide it seems, is truly safe. Traffic is suddenly a much greater threat than before, and one random swipe of the cat can send you crashing into cars, buildings, and other obstacles. If animal rights vans are nearby when this happens, this can max out the rage bar incredibly fast.
If the rage bar does fill, you’re not out of the game yet, but things become more interesting. The cat will go tiger all over you as long as the bar is full, making driving a real pain, as you keep swerving all over the place. You’ll have to drift to calm the animal down, and in general, you’ll want to drift if you must take a turn, because maintaining your speed keeps the tiger less angry.
Take the Pussycat for a Ride
The first Tiger Escort is about as tame as the activities come. Later rides will send more animal rights vans right at you, the tiger itself will be quicker to swipe at you and go into a rage, and your courage meter will take longer to fill with each increase in difficulty.
For this activity, the (relatively) safest route has you make a left immediately from your starting location.
This road is only two lanes, but once you reach the end of it, you can make another left that puts you on a very wide-open four-lane street.
If you’re lucky, the swipes from the tiger won’t send you into other vehicles, and the wide lanes will give you a chance to react to activist vans that come at you head on. Your goal on every Tiger Escort is to get to those wide streets, and the central island has many surface streets that meet this need. If you can get onto the central highway, that can also be a good spot to loop around with relative safety.
Face Your Fear (Angel’s Arc)
Confront Angel
The last stunt with the tiger has left you in a pretty foul mood, I guess the Saints leader is not a cat person. Drive to Angel’s casino and confront the man that has put you through more than the Syndicate in the name of training. As expected, Angel gets all philosophical on you about mastering your fear and not losing the message in the method. At least he is finally satisfied that you are ready to take on Killbane. Call him anytime there is a brawl with the Luchadores and he will have your back.