Gameitall I’m a huge fan of martial arts movies, from the old Shaw Brothers films to newer “realistic” movies like The Protector, or The Raid: Redemption. One location that is famous for it’s action packed movies is Hong Kong, the rainy, dark, gangster filled city… At least according to the movies. It’s the perfect city to have close hand to hand combat, extreme chases that move from running across rooftops to driving on the tight roads while smashing through various marketplace stands, all while having a bullet ballet and destroying half the city.
Sleeping Dogs banks on those facts. It doesn’t give a real portrait of Hong Kong, it does delivers a feeling as close as we’ll get to being in on of those movies.
In Sleeping Dogs you Play as Wei Shen (voiced by Will Yun Lee), an undercover cop tasked with infiltraiting the Sun On Yee, a major Triad group operating in Hong Kong. Wei works his way from Foot-Soldier to a more powerful position. Wei must walk the fine line of being a cop and a high ranking member of the Triad gang.
Like most open world games, the story is not the strong part of the games. New Characters are introduced regularly and die just as often. Half the time your not entirely sure who they are or how they benefit the story. That being said however, there are a few exceptions that really make you like the characters for as little screen time that you have with them.
Sleeping Dogs has 3 basic styles of gameplay. Hand to Hand Combat, Shooting and Chases.
Hand to Hand will come into play a lot during this game and the controls for it is very simple since it follows the same button commands as Batman: Arkham Asylum and Arkham City. You have your basic series of attacks with can be followed with a strong attack which is executed by holding the basic strike button, while you have a single button to block with. The fact that you can use the enviroment is what really makes it stand out. Being able to grab your opponent and slam him into glass, cars, deep fryers and other items to pull of an instant kill move makes for an entertaining combat system, and also show you why there are 380 words in Cantonese for Broken Glass. Weapon combat is also present but it acts more as a power up.
Following most Asian law, guns are hard to come by in Sleeping Dogs. Unlike the GTA protagonists, Wei can only hold one gun at a time and are usually found on site during a mission. While it’s obvious that guns are not the star of the game, it does provide some fun moments thanks to it’s mechanics. While Wei can use cover and shoot people normally, it’s much more entertaining to jump over barriers to enter a slow motion shoot out. This feels very similar to John Woo’s Stranglehold where the slow motion happens when your doing some dive or slide. The more headshots you do during this mode, the longer it will last, making it possible to clear out an entire room of people on one vault.
Finally the Chase. This is also broken out into two different modes, Parkour and Driving. Parkour mode allows you to chase your opponent on the streets and rooftops, it’s a lot of fun and is a great way to travel the city to find more short cuts and secrets. Driving is a little more interesting as sneaking missions you must follow the rules of the road, while racing and getaway missions you must do what ever you can to stop the other drivers, this can be done by ramming your car into them using the car attack button, or by shooting the tire out/drivers to make them crash. The shooting mechanics while driving is the best I’ve seen in a open world game as they give you time to aim and shoot via slow motion.
There are several minigames that get thrown into the missions, including hacking cameras, tracing calls, lockpicking and bugging. These help increase the game’s unique upgrade system which separates between cop and Triad loyalty. If you go through a mission without destroying property, hurting innocence or in general do some things that will jeopardize your standing with the Triads, your cop rating will increase giving you access to more moves such as the action hijack (hijacking a car in while driving another) or a quick draw attack with your guns. While the Triad rating which increases by doing environmental kills and general beat downs will increase you strength and hand to hand combat.
While being a Square-Enix title, I will admit this is not the prettiest game graphic wise, the character facial and running animation seems quite stiff. The cars all look the same and in some cases you hardly notice any change with the supercharge car you were driving to the taxi you just stole. It is nice that the rain seems to have an effect on how everything shines.
A big problem I have though is with the sound department, especially with the guns as it seems like every bullet fired sound so amplified that it doesn’t feel right, almost as if they took a wind chime dropping and increased the volume. It’s an annoying sound and almost makes me dread picking up certain guns. A side from that the cast of the game pulls an amazing job which comes to be expected when you have big name A-list actors like Tom Wilkinson, Lucy Lu, and Emma Stone.
Several other problems also occurred during our testing of the game including a couple game crashing glitches where Wei decided to not react to any commands, forcing us to restart from the last autosaved checkpoint. Other issues ended up being graphical related, including Wei hanging off a semi truck 3 feet from the edge, clipping issues in some animations and some overlapping textures.
What Sleeping Dogs does is that it takes some of the best elements of other games and mashes it together to form something that is fun to play. I believe that United Fronts and Square Enix has a great IP here that they could really expand on.
Sleeping Dogs – 7 out of 10
Pros: Fun gameplay mechanics, interesting set of characters, feels like a Hong Kong Movie.
Cons: Lackluster story, several glitches, poor sound design.
