I heard Jim Sterling praising this game a few months back, and I stuck it on my list of games to look out for to try and get cheap during my stay in the States. Luckily for me I was able to find it, and I finally got around to playing it now~. I knew it was a bit like GTA, but other than that I really didn't know much more about it. I was very pleasantly surprised with what I found. It took me around 40 hours to get all the collectibles and do all the missions/jobs/tasks in the main game as well as the two smaller DLCs part of the main story.
Sleeping Dogs is the story of Wei Shen: A cop who was raised in Hong Kong, moved to San Francisco as a young boy, and has now returned to go undercover in the triads just like he did back in San Francisco. The cast is pretty huge, so there sadly isn't a ton of character development into anyone other than Wei and a couple of his friends, but it never felt like it was outright wasting my time with its story. It even has a fair number of good, plot-involved (or as involved as any of the side characters are, anyhow) female characters, which is a nice change of pace for mafia-centric video game stories. One of my personal favorite smaller quests is when you're following one of the girls you're dating for cheating on you, and when you confront her she calls you out on your double standards for sleeping around, storms off, and then that's the end of the mission XD. Another cool thing is that a fair bit of the dialogue is in Cantonese (with some characters speaking entirely in Cantonese), although that does mean that you'll need to read some subtitles (although, also quite cool, you can turn subs off completely if you want). The story is just as much about Wei's decent into making his infiltration personal rather than professional, but it's not a story that has a ton to say, ultimately. It deals with some very interesting themes, especially about how difficult it can be to have grown up between two places (feeling like an ex-pat in your own country), but it sadly never does much with them. There's certainly an aspect of what feels like missed potential with its narrative, but it still succeeds well in being an entertaining gangster drama that is very often funny but also occasionally horrifically brutal and violent with its portrayal of the dangers that a life of crime can lead to (this is not a game for those with weak stomachs). Mechanically, Sleeping Dogs does a good job of fitting into a role between Yakuza and GTA, albeit not a perfect one. It's got driving I found tons of fun, and the missions and side missions that these sorts of games tend to have. It's got a good variety of mission styles that never got boring for me. You can also buy clothes to get certain passive perks (more XP, better damage, higher health), and also some very silly Squenix-themed super outfits if you want to do the game dressed as Adam Jenson X3. The different kinds of XP are interesting, as they reward you for doing different but not mutually exclusive things. You have Face XP (which is gotten for doing non-story missions, generally), but then you have Triad XP and Police XP, and each kind of XP allows for upgrades in entirely different upgrade paths. Triad XP is gotten for getting kills or doing combat in interesting and varied ways, while Police XP actually starts out maxed and you lose from your total when you do non-cop-ish things (like property damage or harming innocents). It incentivizes playing in a safe but brutal kind of way that I found very enjoyable and fits the games themes well. It has a fair bit of gunplay, but the main focus is on an Arkham-style melee combat system. There aren't a ton of enemy types, but the challenge in combat generally comes from just keeping on top of the numbers around you. For people who've played a ton of games with that style of combat, they might find it a bit easy, but it was always just challenging enough for me. The gunplay is a bit more meh. There's a lot more in the later game than the early game as the narrative heats up, but a lot of the guns aren't that interesting to use, and I often found myself just looking for a pistol instead of a shotgun or a rifle because the pistols were so much more accurate and one headshot kills every enemy. Now, this is Hong Kong, so guns themselves are pretty rare to find outside of missions, so you have no inventory with which to hold a gun (you can stow a pistol in your belt, but even something like fast travling via a taxi will take that from you). They tried to balanced their melee-focused combat with their gunplay that a gangster story usually has and didn't quite hit the mark. The gunplay isn't bad, per se, but it's unremarkable to the point that I kinda wish they'd just leaned harder into making the (already reasonably move-rich) melee system more involved. The presentation is quite nice, but you can tell it's a remaster. Hong Kong is pretty big, but pretty obviously not as large as the actual city. The environments are pretty and the remaster has treated them very well. Hong Kong is a colorful, beautiful city that comes alive in a way that looks fantastic for what's effectively an up-res'd last-gen game. What the remaster hasn't treated so well are the character models, whose lip movements especially can look, ironically enough, like a bad English dub at times with how they don't quite seem to sync up with what's being said. The music selection is good for missions, but the car radio stuff is less than stellar (at least from how I can remember enjoying other, similar game's radio selections). What I did LOVE about the music is not only the karaoke minigame (where the voice actor for Wei is actually singing songs like Girls Just Wanna Have Fun and Take On Me), but they actually made original songs for the game's in-universe pop idol. I love when games go that little extra step to make their worlds feel more alive ^w^ Regarding the two DLCs in the main story, that's Wheels of Fury and The Zodiac Tournament. Wheels of Fury is a fun diversion to get yourself a super car among super cars. It's a really fun set of missions to get through (especially the first one) to get a nearly indestructible, super fast EMP-enabled car with retractable mounted gun turrets XD. The game's aesthetic and presentation already lean into a sort of Hong Kong action movie-style, but The Zodiac Tournament cranks that up to 11. Complete with its own opening credits crawl (totally separate from the main game's) and film-grain effect, it's meant to be a campy, old action movie about a bunch of martial arts experts from around the world all brought to one island to fight for tons of cash by a crazed drunken master! It's mostly just some fairly difficult melee fights, but it rocks its theme so hard that it's a good time despite the relatively unremarkable mission design. Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you are a fan of GTA-style open world games, this is absolutely one not to pass up. It was really cool seeing a game in that style that takes place in such a different setting, despite the narrative shortcomings. It's not mechanically perfect, but it's really solid in all the ways that matter. It's a damn shame that we'll almost certainly never get another one, because with some more polishing, Sleeping Dogs could've been an all-time great in the genre instead of just another fantastic entry.
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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