Switching what seems a decent amount of identities since its conception –from Black Lotus to True Crime: Hong Kong, Sleeping Dogs is what Square Enix is calling this open world action game set in Hong Kong. Whatever Square Enix saw in this title that was worth saving from being shelved, all of us should thank them for picking up the pieces Activision left behind.
Sleeping Dogs does its best to bring the Hong Kong cinema feel to open world gaming. What we get is a story of an undercover agent Wei Shen teetering on the edge, in-house fighting with the Sun On Yee Triads –which is based of the real Triad gang Sun Yee On— and a lot of double crosses. For the most part, United Front Games nails the story in making it feel like most Hong Kong action movies. There are some slight pacing issues in the middle of the game that made me want to just move on with things, but the hooks were in me so deep that I looked past the slow parts. How it all ends also leaves a little more to be desired. Maybe that is my biggest gripe with it all. Sleeping Dogs could have pushed the envelope more but seemed to err on the safe side.
The story was able to shine in Sleeping Dogs due in part to the great cast of voice actors. Just look at this stellar cast:
Everyone nailed their lines and since it seems everyone did their lines in the studio together, there weren’t any long, awkward pauses between characters in the game. Edison Chen seems to channel his inner Bobcat Goldthwait at times. Could you picture Jackie’s character modeled and voiced by Bobcat? Maybe Police Academy 8 will be set in Hong Kong? All I could see when Uncle Po was on screen was James Hong as Lo Pan in Big Trouble in Little China. “They have returned. And this time they are not alone. Egg Shen is with them. Little bastard sorcerer has brought them through the Bog of the Dead Trees.” See? He was foreshadowing meeting Wei Shen in Sleeping Dogs!
What should have been an amazing thing fizzled with Emma Stone’s character. It’s not that she didn’t do a good job, cause she really did. It’s the fact that love interests were whittled down to a two-bit part with the only thing coming out of it being the special bonus to finding items on your mini-map –health statues, lock boxes, security cameras, etc. I would have liked to have seen the ladies play a bigger role in the story of Sleeping Dogs. Having them be something an enemy can use against Wei would give have given the story a more emotional sting to it.
The action in the game is great. Utilizing the school of combat mechanics from Rocksteady’s handbook, dispatching tough guys trying to stomp a mudhole in you is a lot of fun. Although you can sit back and just mash the counter button when enemies turn red, it will be incredibly boring. Instead, the more you treat this like a martial arts movie scene, the more fun you will get out of the combat. There’s enough moves that you will acquire throughout your Hong Kong adventures that it won’t feel that repetitive. You could always use a table saw to slice someone’s face. Or, you could drop their body on some swordfish heads. Death by swordfish, such a terrible way to perish.
Guns are rarely used in Sleeping Dogs, which I love a lot. The few times guns come into play, the controls are a little on the loose side. Thanks to the generous auto-aim, it’s not much of an issue. Sitting behind cover will get you killed so your best option is to slide over cover and enter slo-mo mode, picking off everyone around you with ease. The shootouts that happen during the vehicle chase scenes are a lot of fun but I can see where shooting the tires out of a car for the 15th time can get monotonous. Still, having everything go into slo-mo while leaning out the driver side window making a car flip over from blowing the tires out was a joy for me to do. Boat chases weren’t as fun but that’s because I wanted the boats to flip 20 feet in the air like the cars. I know, how selfish of me.
The promise of quick transitions from combat to chase didn’t quite translate well from paper to video game. Sure, going from a shoot-out in a warehouse to racing down a highway in one mission worked, but when Wei Shen spends 8 seconds too long playing with his crotch rocket, I get a prompt telling me not to lose the person I’m chasing before I even get the damn bike out of park. The animation time of Wei starting up a bike could have been cut down to 3 seconds to make it feel more like an action-packed scene instead of Wei revving the engine trying to look cool for absolutely no one.
Chasing people on foot was great. Free running, sliding over tables, running up walls made it really feel like a good foot chase scene. You’ll still get some issues with the person of interest you’re chasing slowing down enough for you to catch back up if you screw up a button prompt to vault over a table faster. This is still a video game, after all. Wouldn’t be any fun if you had to start over at the very generous checkpoints every time you ran into a wall or jumped up the wrong railing. Vehicle chases are a little more frustrating since not only is it a pain to drive a car in Sleeping Dogs, the camera can also gets away from you since it’s really sensitive. If you can help it, use a bike. They were much easier for me to control.
Now, not having access to the console version of Sleeping Dogs, I can’t say if the PC version is better. I can say that it looks amazing to the eyes, if your PC can handle it. My specs for the system used to play Sleeping Dogs with everything set to medium were:
AMD Phenom II X4 925 2.8GHz
8GB of RAM
ATI 5770 Video Card
Even with some of the assets in the world being flat jpeg images, when using the HD texture pack option, Hong Kong looks sexy to the eyes. You spend most of the time playing at night even though there is a day/night cycle, at least to me. It just seemed like most of the time it was either night time, day time with a cloudy overcast and raining, or night time with rain. Everything looked really good and made me feel like this is what Hong Kong would look like having never stepped foot there myself. Neon lights, street vendors yelling at me to buy cheap suits or food and the random people just chatting about whatever was on their A.I. programmed minds. I found myself driving around the massive areas you can access for at least an hour just to take in all the beauty. If I could only remember to drive on the left side of the road, I wouldn’t have flown 20 feet off my bike every 10 minutes.
For all the side missions you are given in Sleeping Dogs, I never felt implored to go and do them. Racing cars, collecting money from deadbeats, helping random strangers with their issues and hacking security cameras to bust dealers from the comfort of your apartment never felt engaging enough for me to do more than a handful of each.
Unless you want more money or ‘Face XP’ to get access to more choices in the clothes you can wear or the cars you can drive, the benefits you get from doing these side missions don’t outweigh going straight through the story missions. The bonuses and upgrades you can pick from the skill trees you get just by going through the motions of the story is more than enough to make it through to the end. At least you can mop all the unfinished business when you complete the game.
Sleeping Dogs is a open world game that will stand in the limelight with such notables as GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption as an amazing accomplishment. Over the top action, good story, amazing voice work, and the immersive world make this a surprise hit of 2012 and a serious contender for Game of the Year.