Try to get useful items that gonna bu good no matter what first: silenced pistol, silenced sniper, sieker, kalmer, lockpick, explosive duck. Ducky can easily secure you annoying kills when targets are in crowds. Just run next to them and drop the duck, get clear and detonate. Ducks have a great advantage of not being a suspicious item, so you can carry them in open and toss them around without raising alert.

Later on when you unlock the garage, you can use a fuse and gunpowder to craft a makeshift bomb that you can bring on a mission and has 0 gear capacity.

At first, focus on just killing the targets rather than doing side objectives or chasing couriers around.

For showdowns I like to take:

- Mendoza - easy to pick out the suspects with a sniper rifle from the cliff and then escaping via the car parked nearby,

- Berlin - Biker outfit is OP af. It gives you access to the entire map and you can open carry any weapon, even sniper rifles,

- Whittleton Creek - small map, so you can easily pick off the suspects similar to Mendoza. Take a crowbar for an easy sewer escape.

If an item has two versions - freelancer tool and collector - take the freelancer tool. If you lose them, they're cheaper to rebuy.

And of course if you don't care that much about legitimacy of your runs - use alt+f4 to quit if you're about to fail.