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Gangstar New Orleans Tips, Cheats & Strategy Guide: 13 Hints You Need to Know

Gangstar New Orleans is the latest in Gameloft’s Gangstar series, and you can now download the game for your iOS device, now that it’s just gotten a soft launch. As the name of the game suggests, you will be taken to the streets of New Orleans, completing missions and gaining influence as a criminal, yet anti-heroic figure in the Big Easy, acquiring vehicles, guns, and a variety of other goodies along the way. This game, like its predecessors, is reminiscent of Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series for consoles and PC, as it puts you in a similar role of aspiring criminal making his way up in the ranks, with the freedom to roam the city as you please.

New Orleans is teeming with all sorts of negative elements, including biker gangs, crooked cops, and all manner of criminals. Can you survive these rough streets and gain more influence and territory in the bayou, “by any means necessary” as the game’s description so helpfully suggests? We’ve got the right kind of survival guide for you if you’re a beginner – our Gangstar New Orleans strategy guide. Take note that we shall also be including some tips for intermediate players, so read on if you’re new or not-quite-new but not a veteran player either!

1. Collect Your Spirit Jars

During the tutorial part of the game, you and your friend Alain will have to drive to meet a voodoo lady. But you don’t need to fear her, because in this game, she’ll be working the right kind of magic for you, in the form of Spirit Jars. These Spirit Jars are like crates in other games, in the sense that they come loaded with freebies that could be of help to your criminal cause – free stuff such as new cars, weapons, health packs, thugs, and more. There are two main types of Spirit Jars you can open up in the game – free jars, which are available every four hours and contain one item that may be very common or low in value, as well as daily jars, which contain better rewards and can only be opened once every 24 hours.

Apart from those two free jar types, you’ve also got Premium and Exotic Spirit Jars, which would cost you diamonds (the game’s premium currency) in order to purchase. These quite obviously promise better and rarer rewards underneath the jar.

2. You Don’t Need To Three-Star Everything Right Away

By three-starring missions and jobs, you can unlock new difficulty tiers in the game, but more importantly, you can redeem higher-tier and rarer prizes. But as you’ll find out when you start playing the game in earnest, it could be very, very hard to complete a mission/job with three stars at first. The star system is based on how fast it takes you to complete a mission/job, so you do need to work as quickly as possible in order to improve your chances of getting three stars.

However, it really isn’t that important to get three stars in the early goings of the game. While getting a feel for the Gangstar experience, you’ll want to focus primarily on completing the mission, no matter how long it takes. Unless specified, all missions have a “time limit” of one day, which essentially means unlimited time to do what is asked of you. So feel free to take your time and acclimatize yourself to the game, and return to those missions and replay them once you’ve got a faster car, better guns, more experience, etc., so you can go for a perfect three stars.

3. Avoid The Temptation To Time Lapse

The game runs on an energy system, where each mission or job in the game would require you to spend a certain number of energy units in order to push forward. Energy replenishes automatically in the game, or you can complete more missions and get energy among your rewards for completion. And if you’re thinking of using the time lapse cheat (moving your device’s time forward) to skip the wait time, we suggest against doing so, as it might not be worth it at the end of the day. We’re not 100 percent sure about this, but we do know game makers are more cognizant of the time lapse, and are more than happy to ban players caught using the cheat.

4. Complete The Quests

You can access Gangstar New Orleans’ individual quests menu in the left-hand menu of your screen, and once there, you can review the day’s available quests, and the rewards you can expect to receive. (Usually, this would be coins, jar pieces, diamonds, or energy.) Aside from the free stuff you can get by completing the in-game tasks, which can be done by naturally playing the game, these quests are also very useful in setting you on the right path and helping you follow the game’s main storyline and staying prepared for the criminals you’ll meet.

5. Drive (And Walk) Carefully To Get Three Stars

In order to complete those missions and jobs as quickly as possible, you will also need to be as precise with your movements as possible. The game’s controls would take some getting used to, and they could be a tad too sensitive for some players. But if you’re gunning for three stars, you should learn how to balance speed and precision. This also applies when driving cars; always look ahead of you to make sure you don’t miss any turns, and while driving at a reasonably fast pace, watch out for obstacles, and don’t steer left or right too much or you may end up losing control of your car.

We would suggest holding down on the Sprint icon while moving around, but be careful with this one as well. The Sprint button also doubles as a button that allows you to climb walls, and you wouldn’t want to be climbing walls when you could be running at full speed toward the site of your mission.

6. Swipe To Look In A Certain Direction

This isn’t clearly explained in the tutorial, but we have experienced some difficulty in controlling our characters with the directional pad in the in-game interface. Since using this pad could throw your orientation off, you might want to swipe left, right, up, or down to look in that direction. Not only would this help you move around better, it will also help save you from the gunfire of thugs who may be firing at you from behind or from the side.

7. Swipe To Look In A Certain Direction

It wouldn’t be a crime-themed, GTA-esque game without the guns, which means you also need to know how to use them the right way. The good thing about playing in Normal, or default difficulty, is that the game does all the dirty work for you, automatically aiming your weapon at enemies who are in your line of sight (but not spoon-feeding you the ones that may be shooting you from behind), and automatically reloading them. That means all you have to do is to be prepared to fire if you see an enemy thug or boss.

8. Upgrade Your Stuff

Completing missions and jobs can earn you Fusion or Guardian Boosters, and you can use these boosters to fuse your weapons or vehicles, improving their stats and ultimately improving their star rarity. Guardian Boosters give you a bigger stat boost than the Fusion Boosters do, so you’ll want to set them up for your items if you’re lucky enough to receive them. You can also evolve vehicles and weapons, which drastically improves their starts and levels them up, and you can do this if you’ve got the required Juju, which you can get as a prize by completing limited-time events and doing well in them. That means you should be taking part in these events whenever possible if you want to get more Juju, and therefore more resources for the evolution process.

9. Use Those Visual Cues

When on a mission or a job, especially if it’s a racing-oriented job, it’s important that you use the game’s cues in order to get the perfect three stars. For one, there’s the HUD map that appears on the top left corner of your screen – a yellow dot refers to your target, a red dot refers to enemies that are armed and dangerous, and a blue dot refers to the police, who will often try to bust you and end your mission. You will also see distances show up in the game screen – this shows you how close or how far away you are away from the target. And when racing, as we mentioned above, you’ll want to follow the arrows to point you toward the checkpoints, slowing down just as you’re about to turn so you can properly control your vehicle.

10. Losing The Cops

It could take practice to drive quickly and accurately enough to lose the cops, but the game will often ask you to drive away as far as possible so you can get away from them. As you won’t have any yellow dots on the map to follow, you can drive around randomly, speeding away in those clear, straight paths that don’t have too many obstacles. But since you will likely encounter pedestrians, other vehicles, fire hydrants, and other obstacles, the speed/precision balance comes into play once again. Even if the cops are hot on your trail, remain as calm as possible and avoid bumping into obstacles. Oftentimes, police cars will try to trap you if you bump into an obstacle or building, leaving you with no escape as they ram right into your ride!

11. Take Over Businesses To Earn More Money

G’s are the game’s common currency, the money you typically earn by completing missions and jobs. And you can earn even more of that common currency by taking over businesses during select missions. Once you’ve taken over a business – Byron’s Restaurant is the first establishment you can take over in this game – it’s going to earn you money which you can collect in intervals of several hours. Make sure you regularly check back and log back into the game, even if it’s to collect your businesses’ earnings.

12. The Basics Of Turf

We’re going to stick to the basics of this aspect of the game, as the topic of turf would be getting more coverage in our advanced guide to Gangstar: New Orleans. But to fill you in on the bare essentials, the process of taking over turf is the lifeblood of the game’s story. You’ll need to take over more of it in order to unlock more missions and jobs, and before you even attempt to raid someone’s turf and take it over, you’ll need to be leveled up to a certain level, and have a certain amount of influence – for the first turf in the game and its boss Jackson Duke, that would be 50 percent.

Turf raids are timed missions where you have to drive to the turf you are trying to attack, then progress your way through them, killing the boss’ thugs before you encounter the big boss himself, shooting him down until you’ve got him defeated. Once you’ve beaten the boss, the turf will be yours, but you will also have to make sure it’s amply defended with enough thugs.

13. Thugs Can Complete Jobs For You

We also hope to talk more about thugs in our advanced strategy guide, so we will again be talking about the basics here. Thugs are among the free prizes you can get by opening Spirit Jars, and aside from guarding your turf, they can also help you out in another way – by completing jobs. But before you have a thug do a job for you, you will have to check the chances of them successfully completing the job. Generally speaking, you can let your thug handle things if the odds are at 75 percent or more. Otherwise, it may be best that you do it yourself.

That’s all for now, as far as our Gangstar New Orleans tips and tricks are concerned. In case you know additional hints for the game, don’t hesitate to leave us a message!

rajin bastakoti

Friday 21st of May 2021

how can you change the controls let me know plzzzzzzzzzzz

guru

Tuesday 10th of November 2020

how to jump in in this game ?

Sam'

Tuesday 24th of September 2019

How to how do you do a long jump on Gangstar New Orleans let me know

Justin Dutta

Tuesday 2nd of May 2017

Does anyone know how I can increase my battle rating? I am really struggling to finish this A mission from Alain, and every time I try to access and play the mission, it says my battle rating is too low, which is why I feel scared and turn down. Am I just supposed to upgrade my guns or...?