==PLEASE NOTE== This guide is outdated, and I am currently working on a video tutorial series with much more in-depth analysis of the levels and strategies used to beat the game as fast as possible. However, this guide will be preserved even after I am done producing the video series.

I recently picked up this game as a speedrun initially as a joke, but as I've sunk time into it, I've noticed that several of the levels have neat timesaves in them that can go a long way of bringing a quite lengthy speedrun down by quite a bit. These tips range from simple optimizations to really hard level strategies to shave off time.

I'm still going through the process of timing things, so expect this guide to be ever-fluid and changing.

Version Differences

The only currently know differences that affect the speedrun between the NA and EU versions of the game is that the NA version has mid-level checkpoints. This makes the game much less punishing.

General Strategies

This section deals with strategies that can tackle any level.

Disable Auto-Saving

Disabling auto-saving from the options menu before you start any of your runs will save you a tiny amount of time when you complete a mission, especially when playing on hardware.

Skipping Cutscenes

Every single in-engine cutscene can be immediately skipped by pressing start.

Abuse Every I-Frame You Got

The obvious downside of trying to stay alive by pressing ▢ is that you can't shoot while you're hugging a bumper. However, as long as you're in any part of the dodging animation (moving to and from the bumper), you are immune to damage. Being able to cut shotgun blasts and Chainpistol bursts as close as possible can save you time all over the run while avoiding losing your entire HP bar to not dodging.

Stay Focused On Your Objective

In "capture" missions (A Test of Metal, Babes, Boats, and Bullets, etc.), the mission ends when you, well, capture all the highlighted vehicles. Nothing else matters, so if you can get away with ignoring additional enemies, then it will save you a lot of time. Same applies to boss fights: always be dealing damage unless you absolutely have to either ditch your ride or you are being impeded.

Keep That Justice Meter Going

Having full Justice allows you to take more risks, since you deal a slight bit more damage, and it basically makes △ your bailout button. However, if you're performing a Justice Shot, if you try and conserve justice by not firing at the next person in the vehicle, you are wasting time being in slow motion (unless you need Justice for an upcoming 3rd person section or a boss).

• Brute Force is a basically free way of getting meter. Try getting a quick ram in on the vehicle you're about to hijack before jumping. Constantly ramming bosses is also a quick way to farm Justice
• You can press △ just before landing on a vehicle during a Justice Shot and burn your meter to get health back. Now you have the vehicle cleared and you're at full health.

Understand What The AI "Rubber Bands" To

In racing games, rubber banding or wastebanding is a term for when the AI reacts to how fast your going and attempts to either speed up to catch you, or slow down so you can catch them. This is usually accomplished by the AI cheating by going faster than their vehicles normally would allow them to. If you know what the AI is rubber banding to, you can use that to your advantage.

Let's say you're doing a mission where you need to eliminate X amount of enemies (Girl's Best Friend, Rapid Reaction, etc). You want to be going as fast as you can at all times so you can catch up with the enemy at the front of the pack. If you jump on each enemy's vehicle and clear them out as you go, you are not going to be consistently going at your full speed to catch up to the front. If you get ahead of an enemy in line, they'll rubber band to you and tail you, allowing you to chip away at the vehicles HP while you maintain maximum speed.

Sometimes enemies will be after other objectives, such as escort missions (Witness Protection, Atomic Ambush) and missions where you need eliminate an enemy attacking someone (Ski Run Rampage, Daylight Archeology). The AI will rubber band the people they're harassing, not you. If you speed off, they will not tail you and you'll have to slow down to let them catch up.

Know Which Cars Are Better To Shoot VS Jump To

Every vehicle in the game has a durability stat. The common rule seems to be:

• The gang's sedan cars (Frankenstein, the Ryokou Tsuba, the Grainger Advantage, etc.) generally are all pretty weak. Even if you don't have Justice, it is faster to gun them down rather than jumping to their car and having them slow down during your assault.
• The gang's convertibles (Hybrid, the Magnello M40s, the Emmerson V12 GT, etc.) can usually take a good beating. As well, being a convertible, there's only two enemies to take care of when you hijack them. It's almost always faster to steal these.
• The gang's 4x4 vehicles tend to be as strong as their convertibles, but house more people. I'll leave this to you to decide if they're worth jumping to or not.

Being smart about which cars you destroy and which cars you jump to can shave off a lot of time all over the run.

3rd Person Strategies

There's a number of ways you can tackle these levels:

• The two main strategies are either run left and right to dodge enemy fire, or by pressing ▢ to crouch and take significantly less damage as you waddle your way through thinning the level.
• You have I-frames during the whole arresting animation. It might be slow, but if you're low on both HP and meter, it's the best way of going through large groups without immediately being roasted alive.
• If you're targeting someone from a distance and you walk within arresting range of an enemy you're not targeting, your next shot will be an arrest on the enemy you're standing next to.
• Shotguns and similar high-damaging weapons do not benefit from having a full Justice meter since they take 2 shots to kill regardless.
• If there's still more of the mission after the 3rd person section, see if it's worth arresting the last enemy on the map to take their firearm. Bringing a Shotgun or APG5 into the Lt. Davies fight with full Justice, for example, is a big brain play.

The biggest time save you can come up with though is plotting how to move through the level to defeat/arrest enemies and taking into account where you need to be standing to exit/end the section.

Level Strategies

This section goes over the strategies I use for each of the levels (if I even have a strategy for that level...) and how do reliably do them. If I don't talk about a certain level here, that just means I don't have any special strategies for them yet. Just keep in mind all the tips in the General section and you'll speed through those levels just fine.

Cold Contract

Cold Contract is first mission in the game that's a basic destroy mission, and there's several strategies you can use for these missions beyond simply jumping from boat to boat. Consider the following video:

What is faster or slower varies depending on the stage. I highly encourage you to be creative with how you tackle these levels, and see if you can find a faster way than doing the level the "intended way".

In general, I've found strategies that involving grouping everyone together (as seen in the video as the Rush Ahead strategy) end up losing time in practice due to lag. Perhaps the answer for optimally completing these kinds of missions lie in a combination of various strategies, such as rushing ahead to the middle of the pack to avoid lag, while still being able to catch up to the head of the pack quickly.

Line of Fire (Deadeye Fight)

The failure condition for part one of the mission where you're tailing Deadeye is if you either are too close, or fall too far behind. However, you have a buffer period to either slow down if you're too close, or speed up if you're falling behind. Ramming Deadeye a bunch does not fail the mission unless you get too greedy, so if you're brave, you can get a bunch of meter before entering the main fight against him. Just don't hit any civilian cars and lose it all.

After you save the mayor, I usually allow Deadeye to speed ahead before setting off myself. Hovering around him can punch holes through your paper SEMC Falcon.

Witness Protection

When you're exactly 1km out, punch it to the end. As long as you're 800m away when the 10 second time warning starts, you'll make it.

Hardware Hijack

Don't jump on the first pickup in the mission and just chip away it's HP until you get to the other two Warlord pickups. Quickly hijacking the two lead pickups and gunning down the last one saves a tiny bit a time.

Atomic Ambush

You have an insanely long grace period to get back to the convoy compared to Witness Protection (25 seconds). If you're confident the convoy can survive the final Warlord that says hello at around 1.8km mark, you can speed off and still have plenty of time before failing the mission.

As mentioned in the 3rd Person Strategies section, bringing a gun will a full justice meter into the Lt. Davies fight is worth the time of watching the arrest animation.

Ski Run Rampage

Just remember that the Frankenstein has virtually no HP, and the Nail Hammer is a garbage weapon against vehicle armour.

Wilde's Boys

The first part is another basic destroy mission, but I really want to express how happy I am this strategy actually saves any time at all:

It's accomplished by jumping to another vehicle at the same time another enemy jumps to the Pursuit Car. The enemy gets control of the Pursuit Car and follows you for the rest of the stage! Since the Pursuit Car has a higher top speed than any of the Convict's vehicles, you actually save time over driving the Smasher to the bridge blockade.

The Forger

Part 1 where you're racing to the airport is a great example of saving time by staying in the vehicle that has the highest top speed for as long as possible. If you zoom ahead of the Hybrid, the other Convicts will rubber band to you. Just keep in mind you need to defeat both Frankenstiens before you reach the airport, so don't delay too long!

As for part 2, I hope you have something to read during the long 20k trip ahead of you.

Don the Run

You don't have to defeat any additional enemies during the The Don Capelli fight. You can speed through all the cronies and start the boss fight pretty early using your motorcycle. The downside to this is all the AI will rubber band and swarm you when you start making a dent in Don Capelli's health bar. If you've been chipping away at the HP bars of the other cars as you speed to the fight, you should be able to clear them quite easily since the most of the mooks are driving the low-HP Grainger Advantage.

During the fight, if you don't have meter, you can continually slam against Don's limo to get some quick meter. That tiny bit of extra damage goes a long way.

Velocity

Okay listen up, because I made this mistake once and I never want to see someone else lose 5 minutes because of it.

After the officer comes to pick up the passengers,* you will not start unloading passengers until they are driving to the left side of the bus*. If you're on the left side of the road, all the officer will do is scrape along the side of your bus and do nothing.

Very cool video game.

Day of the Dam

Alright, this level is really stupid if you want to get the "warp". I don't know if calling it a warp is the best term, but I haven't thought of a better name for what to call it.

You can save a lot of time by destroying the first groups of Warlord boats in a specific way. When you destroy a group of boats, you move ahead to the next group like you would in any of the helicopter missions. At 6.5km you'll be dropped from the helicopter onto the boat farthest back in the convoy. If your accuracy is impeccable, you'll have just destroyed the second last group in time and be teleported ahead to the lead boats! However, we need to talk about the third group of boats who I've dubbed "the Jokers" because of their complete incompetence at piloting boats.

This chicane in the river will be the cause of all your woes on this level. If you defeat the first two groups too quickly, the third group will smash into the first turn of the chicane, costing you a lot of time. If you go too slow, they'll either crash in the second turn of the chicane or you'll be going too slow to destroy the fourth group in time.

The cue I've used to know if you'll be fine and be on pace to get the warp is if you destroy the second group of boats almost exactly at 8.8km. I've found the Jokers don't crash if you zoom in on them from this exact distance. From there, burn meter during the fourth group so you don't die and can actually see what you're shooting, and hopefully you'll have destroy every boat except the first two and be warped to the front!

All this to save 15 seconds.

General's Revenge

The fight won't start until the rear guard has been dealt with, so milk as much meter as you quickly can out of them and ram the general's boat a few times to get meter. If you have to burn Justice because of the infuriating hellfire missile attack he does, then so be it. Just don't stop shooting him.

Bus to the Border

If you "order" this fight wrong, it's very easy to run out of time. Here's what I do:

• Destroy the first two Frankensteins. Hijacking these cars is a terrible idea twofold: they're not strong enough to even withstand one ball throw, and the process of hijacking them is Make sure to ram them and Hard Ball's bus to get meter, just as long as you don't go out of range from the bus.
• For the Hybrid and Smasher that show up before the second and third cycles, it is faster to hijack them rather than whittle their HP down. Both of those cars have enough armour to withstand Hard Ball's ball.

As long as you constantly put pressure on Hard Balls, you can three-cycle him. It's very easy to be pixels away from a three cycle, too, so getting meter early and always being in range of the bus can save a lot of time.

Fox Hunt

The Fox always shows up at the 15k mark, regardless of how many Vixens you defeat. Make sure to ram the cars trying to jump your truck for free meter as well. You will usually have one or two Vixens be giving you trouble right before this 15k point, so try not to damage them and jump to their vehicles the moment's Fox's text box appears. That truck really slows you down.

Babes, Boats, and Bullets

Of all the levels in the game with strategies to save a bucket-load of time, this is up there with one of the hardest. I call it "Beating the Bump".

There's a place on the map I call "The Bump", a section where the highway chicanes away from the river. If you're really fast, you can highjack all three trucks and jump to a boat before this bump.

In order to steal the trucks fast enough, you'll need to jump on the trucks as far up the side as you can rather than jump them from behind, as well as avoiding having to dodge as much as possible. It requires a lot of practice, but having to go around that chicane adds a lot of time having to catch up with the boats.

Guardian

You can just run to the car in the 3rd person section. LOL.

Synthetic Science

Plot out your route in the 3rd person segment to have full meter and a weapon heading into the Sudeko fight.

As for the fight itself, you can defeat Sudeko very easily as long as you mind those grenades. A "perfect" Sudeko fight is never once going out of range and never having to burn your meter to heal yourself.

Risky Business

You can save an insane amount of time if your aim during the chopper section is good. It's very difficult since how far away the enemies are makes it difficult to hit. If you can blow up both bikes and the Saiko, the rest of the pack ahead will start much closer than they would normally.

Whiplash

Whiplash takes damage while the vehicle she's standing on is on fire. What you can do is set up situations where she's suck on a car for as long as possible early on. As long as she's below half health, at the 6.4k mark phase two will start. You cannot damage Whiplash any more than that until phase two, so once you've dealt enough damage you can just race ahead and Whiplash will rubber band to you.

Monster Toshima

The vehicles that hide behind the gold transport can poke out a bit. You will not move on from the transport until all the mooks have been shot off of the roof, so if you can destroy the vehicles they're riding in before they jump, you can save time by skipping having to shoot them off the truck.

For the Toshima fight itself, you have a very large lock-on range to him. Hit the sweet spot of being able to constantly fire at him, while being able to brake and avoid being set on fire. If you can find that happy medium, you're laughing.