If you have a moment of quiet before encountering more enemies, tap the weapon icon in the top-right corner of the screen to reload your selected firearm. This should give you a good idea of where you can hide from the inevitable hail of gunfire. The little 'cover' button will activate whenever you're close enough to something you can put between you and bullets, and a similar icon will appear on the objects themselves as you near them.

You can't complete a mission if you're dead, right? Your character is given a numerical rating based on the overall strength of their weapons, and if your stuff isn't powerful enough you're likely to have a more difficult time of things. Once you meet the requirements you can totally take advantage of the higher risk/higher rewards thing. You can't attempt Hard until you beat the mission on Normal with at least one star, and you can't try Expert unless you beat Hard with at least one star.

Play on Hard (or Expert) for even better rewards.

If you come up short in the first attempt, you can try again until you finish fast enough.

Replay missions to try and earn better times.

Try to keep this in mind if you want to earn three stars and the best loot. The faster you finish, the better your rewards. Missions have timers that keep track of how long you take to complete them. Completing missions will be your bread and butter while you try to expand your nefarious influence.

Gangstar 4 game play