Sleeping Dogs takes place in Hong Kong with you playing as Wei Shen, a Hong Kong-born but American-raised police officer who's sent undercover to infiltrate the Triads. The narrative is your fairly predictable undercover police story - cop works his way up the latter, gets emotionally attached to the group he's supposed to be infiltrating, there's the question of mixed loyalties, he has to make a decision, yada yada. While I would have liked something a little less by the numbers, the story is still excellently told with some really memorable characters, some genuinely touching moments and fantastic voice acting. Much has been made of some of the Hollywood voice talent attached the the game such as Tom Wilkinson, Lucy Liu, and Emma Stone but the real star of the voice cast is lesser known actor Will Yun Lee who plays Wei Shen. Lee does an incredible job of bringing Wei Shen to life and yielding an emotional depth that's more often than not missing from most video game characters.
The story has a solid arc with a satisfying resolution that still leaves things open for a potential sequel.
I've mentioned more than a dozen times on this blog that I'm a sucker for any kind of open-world games because I just love exploring virtual environments. Sleeping Dogs impresses right off the bat because it takes place in Hong Kong. I've never been to Hong Kong but after 18 hours in Sleeping Dogs I feel like I've been in and around a fictional facsimile of the Pearl of the Orient. Something as small as driving on the left side of the road in right-hand-drive cars makes a massive difference in the feel of the world. Sleeping Dogs' fictional Hong Kong has 4 boroughs connected by highway with a hill/mountain in the middle. Despite the actual map size being small, the verticality of the city gives a great sense of scale to the map. Building, roadside and highway details are fantastic but I wish there were more buildings you could enter. When the sun goes down the city becomes a neon jungle with signs everywhere.
The city isn't as large or detailed as GTA IV's Liberty City (after finishing Sleeping Dogs I went back to GTA IV just to make sure nostalgia wasn't clouding my memory) nor is it as large as Steelport from Saints Row: The Third, but it does have tons of character and each of the different boroughs has enough unique characteristics to make Sleeping Dogs' Hong Kong feel like a real place.
The real star of the game, however, isn't the story or the open world itself, but rather the gameplay and in particular, the hand-to-hand combat. Sleeping Dogs borrows heavily from the hand-to-hand combat system used in Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham Asylum and Arkham City games. It's just as brutal and satisfying but it differs from the Batman games in terms of the timing (it's much less precise and more forgiving) and the increased variety with regards to moves, combos and environmental attacks. I actually enjoy it even more than the aforementioned Rocksteady games and it definitely sets the standard for hand to hand combat in open world games to come.
Gun-play is also really well done and it's important to note that you don't actually do that much shooting in this game - most missions still involve hand to hand combat and this is a nice change from the open-world norm. While the shooting is not as snappy or responsive as the excellent shooting in Saints Row: The Third, it's a lot better than GTA IV's (including the Ballad of Gay Tony expansion). There's also a severicable cover system and some Max Payne-esque slow-mo involved when you vault over cover or shoot out of a moving car. It's very neat.
Likewise, the driving is a good intermediate between the heavily physics-based (and almost too twichy) driving in GTA IV and the stop-on-a-dime crazy arcadeyness found in Saints Row: The Third. As mentioned, the game implements some very cool slow-mo when you start shooting out of a moving car. The ability to shoot the tires out of chasing cars and see them flip into the air like something out of an 80s action movie is a bit over the top (and something I'd more expect to see in Saints Row) but still a lot of fun and very well done. Similarly over the top (and similarly just as fun), is the ability to car-jack from a moving vehicle a la Pursuit Force! If you hold down the A button while driving Wei opens the driver-side door (or sits up in his motorcycle seat) and if you get close enough to another vehicle a prompt appears and you hit A again and he'll jump from one vehicle to another. For some larger vehicles you then have to control Wei as he crawls around the top or side with the driver trying to shake him off! As I said before, it's completely over the top but a lot of fun and again, something I think should be included as an option in more open world games.
Another neat addition to the driving is the ability to press a button to automatically ram other cars. If you're driving and another car is beside or in front of you, if you press a direct and the X button your car suddenly lurches/jumps a few feet in the chosen direction. It's completely unrealistic but it adds another dimension to the car chases - particularly when you're being chased by the cops. If you're being chased by the cops in a GTA game the only ways to lose your tail are to either make it to a Pay & Spray location or get out of the cone of vision/influence of the chasing police. The latter system is also employed in Sleeping Dogs but you can also end a police chase by taking out a finite number of chasing cop cars by ramming them. This is a ton of fun but it also does take a lot of the tension out of police chases. I never once felt that an entire mission was going to go to shit because the cops were going to take me down - something I'm regularly terrified of in GTA.
Tying everything up in a neat bow is an excellent RPG-like progression system. Each mission you complete earns you both 'Triad' and 'Police' points. The more brutal your kills/actions; the higher your Triad score, while the more you try to obey the law while undercover (i.e. not running over pedestrians or killing innocents) the higher your Police score. These points are then used to unlock different abilities such as new combat moves or time-slowing bonuses during gunplay.
Those two meters, however, aren't the only ways you can evolve your character. Scattered around Hong Kong are random, miscelanous missions that unlock 'Face' (street cred) points. These points unlock global abilities such as a discount on certain items or secrets appearing on your mini-map. Speaking of secrets, as mentioned before, you can unlock new combat moves by earning Police and Triad points but there is a whole branching tree of combat moves that are unlocked by finding special jade statues. The story conceit is that these statues belong to your old Kung-Fu master/sifu and by returning them to him he teaches you a new move. The sifu character is actually quite well done and both he and Wei have some very interesting conversations. Rounding things out are 'Health Shrines' that are hidden around the city. Finding and praying at each shrine increases your maximum health.
These RPG-like systems not only add more depth to the gameplay, they give you another reason to keep driving forward besides the (very good) story. Sure you want to play one more mission because you want to find out what's happening to Wei, but you also want to do more missions so you can unlock cool new moves and abilities. It's very implemented and it's something that no GTA game (save San Andreas, which, incidentally is my favourtite) has done.
Special note has to be made of what an incredible PC port this is. Kudos to developer United Front Games for creating a PC version that isn't crippled and makes full use of the power of modern PCs. I played it on the PC using the free high-res texture pack and the results are stunning. The screenshot attached to this post is one I took on my own computer just using Steam's F12 capture - and it looks even better in motion. Best of all, you don't need to have a kick-ass rig to run the game at high settings - my PC is 2 years old and ran it just fine.
All in all, Sleeping Dogs is a fantastic game that I thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish. I loved being able to explore a fictional Hong Kong while kicking seven shades of crap out of Triads. The story may be a tad predictable but it's expertly written and still very engrossing. It took me 18 hours to finish it and I enjoyed every second.
Assasin's Creed 3 and Borderlands 2 are still to come out but I already know that Sleeping Dogs will most definitely been in the running for my personal game of the year.
Lavan
PS Kudos also to United Front and Square Enix for some excellent cover cart by Tyler Stout.
PPS While the game still runs fine on the 360, if you have a solid PC I would definitely go with that as it looks much better and plays the same with a 360 controller.
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