Case One: Popstar, Leads One and Two

Lead One: Identifying the Supplier

First, bring up your smartphone and text Dirty Ming. He offers to meet with you at a restaurant. The location will be marked on your map.

Drive over to Ming, and make sure to avoid causing trouble for civilians or it’ll cost you Cop points. The meeting with Ming is brief, but informative. He names his connection as Popstar, and gives you his location: a basketball court mere blocks away. Do not attract police attention, and if you do, don’t bring it to Popstar.

Popstar rests on his “throne” at the basketball court, but is surprisingly agreeable with Wei as he walks up. He’s willing to continue supplying Ming. He just needs to get paid in advance. Conveniently, he has a way to handle that. Some deadbeats have screwed him out of payment, and if you’re willing to feed them some fists and take the payment from them yourself, he will hook you up.

The deadbeats are close by at a convenience store. One of the pair tries to put up some token resistance. Follow the in-game prompts to introduce him to the phone booth, and return to his friend. The trash-talking deadbeat thinks twice and pays up. Take the money back to Popstar.

Popstar is good to his word and hands the goods over to Wei, along with a somewhat disturbing message for Ming. There’s no time to consider it in detail, as the HKPD arrives on the scene to make a bust. One of the officers tackles Wei to the ground. You must press the Action button when prompted, otherwise you’ll be taken into custody and will have failed the mission.

After escaping the officer, quickly get to a vehicle and make your getaway. If you haven’t been stirring up trouble on your own, this might be your first real cop pursuit. Unless you’re in a smoking quick ride, even level 1 Heat like this is hard to shake simply by driving fast. If you want to just out drive the cops, you’ll need to take as complex a route as possible, drive against traffic to slow down the cops, and take a stunt jump or two, if you know where those are.

You can try to Ram Attack pursuing cop cars, but this has obvious risks to your Cop points at the end of the mission. Once all of the pursuit cars are taken out, stay out of trouble for a moment to let things cool down.

By far the most entertaining and satisfying way to ditch the cops is to do an Action Hijack on their vehicles, or on other civilian vehicles. They’ll lose sight of you momentarily, and this gives you a chance to drive out of their search radius.

After escaping, you’re prompted to call Inspector Teng with the new information you’ve learned from Popstar. Wei wants to nail both Popstar and his supplier, Fang Shen, and he needs information on the latter. After the call, deliver the goods to Ming and you’ll have completed the first lead.

Lead Two: Arresting the Supplier

With Popstar’s supplier identified, it’s time to move in and take Fang Shen down. The provided information marks Fang Shen’s typical haunts at Lok Fu Park.

The group of thugs at the park do not take kindly to Wei just showing up, and immediately rush to confront him. The park is a nice open area, but there are still some environmental hazards to use to your advantage. It’s even possible to throw an unlucky goon into traffic! Continue fighting until the remaining thugs retreat, leaving their unconscious friends behind. After the fight is won, contact Inspector Teng. You’ll be prompted to hack the nearby Spy Camera.

It’s easy to miss this security panel, but this is where you need to hack the system.

This Hacking minigame will be seen quite often throughout the game, and it works the same pretty much every time. Basically, you need to guess the four-digit password, but you only have six attempts before the system resets the password. The easiest way to complete this minigame is to start with four digits. Although you can start with any numbers, a simple starting point is 0, 1, 2, 3.

Digits that are correct, but are not in the right place, are marked yellow. Digits that are wrong are marked red. Digits that are both correct and in the right place are marked green. By following a simple process of elimination, you should be able to guess the password within the six attempts almost every time. If by chance you fail, don’t get discouraged—just try again.

Once the camera is hacked, you need to return to your safehouse to access it from your television. This starts another minigame in which you control the camera’s viewfinder to try and locate the supplier, and then call the police in to make the arrest. The game will mark the supplier for you after several moments. Then just make the call to trigger the bust.

With the supplier in custody, Popstar will need to get his merchandise from another source. Wei believes he can deliver both Popstar and his new supplier to the HKPD, but informs Teng that he will need a disguise in order to get close to Popstar. This ends the second lead, and the investigation has halted for the moment. You’ll need to progress a little further in the main story before Inspector Teng has the equipment ready for Wei.