Empire City: 1931 (Italy)

Mastering Empire City: 1931 (Italy) is all about deliberate aim and quick target prioritization, whether you’re playing with a light gun peripheral, controller, or keyboard on PLAYERETRO. Follow these tips to beat every level and top the leaderboards. First, learn to distinguish hostile targets from civilians immediately. Armed gang members will always wear dark suits or trench coats, carry visible guns, and move aggressively toward your line of sight, while unarmed bystanders wear casual clothing, hold their hands up in surrender, and move slowly away from conflict. Hitting a civilian costs you 25% of your maximum health and 500 points, so never fire until you are 100% sure of your target. Second, destroy every interactive environmental object you spot. Trash cans, storefront windows, parked car hoods, and street lamps all hide bonus rewards, including extra ammo, health refills, and 1,000-point bonus tokens. These refills are especially critical in later levels, where enemy spawn rates double and boss fights deal far more damage per hit. Third, adjust your strategy for the Italian variant’s unique balancing: this edition has slower enemy spawn rates than the original Japanese release, but boss enemies have 30% more health. Save your high-damage shots for boss fights, and aim for headshots to deal double damage and cut down fight time. For the final boss, who hides behind a row of hostages on the casino rooftop, wait for him to peek out from between the hostages every 3 seconds, and aim directly for his forehead to take him out in 4 hits without harming any civilians. Finally, don’t skip the end-of-level bonus rounds, where you shoot flying glass bottles for bonus lives. Hitting all 10 bottles in a bonus round grants you an extra life, which will carry you through the harder final three levels of the game.