This is the first piece in a planned series of reviews going back and revisiting classic games from previous generations. Sleeping Dogs was originally released on PS3, Xbox 360 and Windows in 2012. A remastered version for consoles followed two years later, which also included all the previous DLC and was branded the “Definitive Edition”. Play for this review was started on the PS3 version which I picked up a few years ago then put down – I came back and played it properly more recently on the PS4 remaster.
I’ve been playing games since the day I came home from primary school to find my dad had bought the family a Commodore 64 for “educational purposes”. How many kids in the 80s got their start in video games due to this fallacy? I moved on to the Mega Drive, Amiga, Saturn and finally the original PlayStation by the late 90s. I duly progressed to the PS2 when I was living in Japan in the early to mid 00s but video game play took a bit of a hit when my now wife moved into my one room apartment. Acquisition of a PSP helped feed my gaming needs but the PS2 eventually got sold as it was just gathering dust.
We got married in 2005 and over the next ten years or so life just completely got in the way of gaming – moving countries and continents, changing jobs and careers and ultimately becoming parents were all blockers for my former hobby. Once we had an extra mouth to feed, the cost also became a factor. By the time I became aware that the PS4 had made it to the market, it was with some alarm I realised that I had just missed an entire console generation – with the sole exception of a couple of shots of my mate’s PS3 when I was round at his house for a bevvie.
Probably around 2016 another friend of mine got himself a PS4 and was telling me how great it was – when I commented that I hadn’t even got a PS3 yet he was like “do you want one?”. His partner’s son had one languishing in the loft which had not been switched on in years. I of course gladly took him up on this offer and a week or two later had a slim PS3 sitting under my telly ready for use. A visit to CEX brought the delightful news that – as it was now old gen tech – PS3 games were readily available for buttons! Only around ten years late to the party I set about exploring the back catalogue of classic games – and now I am going to commit my thoughts of a number of these classics as reviews for Pure Dead Gaming.
I remember picking up Sleeping Dogs for either £1.50 or £2 in CEX – I had never heard of it and was sceptical that it would be any good at such a low price. But the premise sounded cool af – an open world game based in Hong Kong featuring both the triads and the police.
In the game you play the protagonist Wei Shen – originally a native of Hong Kong who was brought up in the USA and has recently returned to his hometown. In the early stage of the game it seems that he is just another small-time gangster but it is soon revealed that he is in fact an undercover officer in the Hong Kong Police Department. This sets the scene for the main story of the game – Shen gets sucked in deeper and deeper to the HK underworld but still has to maintain his responsibilities as a public servant and police officer. It’s not a particularly original story but it mostly works really well – I have some reservations though which I will get into in due course.
The first time I played Sleeping Dogs I put two or three hours in but it didn’t click with me for whatever reason. I always thought it would be a good one to come back to so when I saw it on sale on PSN a year or so ago I put it in my library. Now, in 2022 I have finally gone back and fully committed to it and the TLDR is that I absolutely love the game!
That’s not to say it doesn’t have its flaws – it does, just like any other game. In this review I will talk about the strong parts of the game, discuss some areas that I think are not so well done and finally I will break down in tears at the realisation that the game will (unless someone acquires the IP) never get the sequel that could have raised it to masterpiece level! United Front Games, the Vancouver based studio that developed the game, closed for business in 2016…
The open world of Hong Kong is brilliantly implemented – big enough so that if the player desires they can spend time doing side missions / collectables instead of the mainline story but, crucially, never so big that it is overwhelming or intimidating. (I came into my play of Sleeping Dogs straight off the back of completing AC Origins – a game which I eventually came to truly love but did suffer quite a lot of “open world fatigue” in the middle, around 25 – 35 hours. I was dubious about playing another open world game straight away but Sleeping Dogs turned out to be the perfect fit.)
Progression through the game is extremely well paced and structured. For example, you don’t get a hint of gunplay until you are approaching the end of the main story for the first (of four) areas on the map: the game makes sure your hand to hand combat skills are well honed before letting you near a gun. The climatic mission for this first area subsequently utilises gunplay and further introduces the mechanic of action highjacking. After this mission you then start to encounter side quests which employ said highjacking. It builds layers of gameplay upon what is learned and experienced earlier in the game – nothing revolutionary but really well executed.
Hand to hand combat is very well done, using a straightforward control system which allows you to take on groups of bad guys in a very smooth, fluid fashion. It is apparently similar to that in the Arkham Batman games but, as I haven’t played those, I can’t comment. It took me a bit of time and practice and at the time of writing I do still struggle a bit with fights against larger groups of bad guys, but I have definitely made a lot of progress.
In a recurring theme, I found the skill trees made genuine differences without being over convoluted. There are three types of upgrade – cop, triad and melee, each of which has only two branches. Enough to make you think about what you are going to spend upgrade points on but still simple enough to keep things ticking over at a nice pace.
The blend of main versus side missions is balanced perfectly in my opinion. There are never any more than a handful of available missions – you can seek out side quests like favours and cop jobs – but your progression through the story is really well paced.
To sum up, “big enough but not too big, enough side missions and collectibles in it without being overwhelming” is some of the strongest praise I can give an open world action game.
Like I said, it’s not all perfect – I am nitpicking to a certain extent but even though I mostly played the PS4 Definitive Edition remaster, the game’s roots as a PS3 generation title can be seen through e.g. the blurring of the background into distance and the character models. As a late stage PS3 title it looked great on that machine but it is showing its age these days. We’re not getting a sequel (sob sob) but a “ground up” remake would be most welcome.
One thing I get annoyed with in games and films alike is people always speaking English – it really breaks immersion to hear, e.g. characters in the Yakuza series speak English. Subs over dubs is a hill I will die on everytime. So, the language in Sleeping Dogs is one of my frustrations. The majority of the speech in the game is in (frequently American accented) English. This can be explained away for the main character Wei Shen by the fact that he has returned to Hong Kong from growing up in the USA. I’ve never been to Hong Kong so I have no direct experience but I really struggle to believe that the denizens of the island city state punt their pork bowls, fish balls, noodles etc in English to their fellow citizens.
There are the odd Cantonese words / phrases interspersed throughout but I actually found this negated one potential positive of the extensive use of English – not needing to read subtitles. I kind of found this to be the worst of both worlds – extensive English breaks the immersion but there are still bits I need to check in the subtitles so I have to follow those as well.
Having said all that, the use of English does allow for some moments of comedy – running through the night market in North Point and you can hear the merchants selling their wares with phrases like “all Hollywood movies, very cheap” and “my duck gives you healing powers”!
Driving in Sleeping Dogs can be unsatisfying. I’m not the biggest fan of driving games but I don’t generally mind it being integrated into more varied games. It’s mostly done reasonably well here but it can get slightly annoying at times – it is really easy to clip the corner of a building or a wall etc when you are barrelling down a street at top speed and grind to a halt, watching as your quarry pulls away from you. I personally didn’t have any inclination to do any of the street races the game offers as side missions and merely did what I needed to do to advance the main storyline.
There is a kind of fast travel where you can hail a taxi and then get taken to a selection of (but not all) locations on the map. Lack of taxis available can be frustrating though and lead to some aimless running around “looking for a vehicle” game time.
The in car music isn’t great, I didn’t really get the “just drive around and listen to tunes” vibe you get with some open world games. There was a mix of (presumably) authentic Cantonese tunes with some hip hop (the odd tune of which I recognised) but overall the audio experience is one of the weaker parts of the game in my opinion.
My ability to actually play games at times doesn’t match my enthusiasm to do so. This, coupled with a lack of patience when it comes to dying multiple times, boss fights and so on, means it is not unusual for me to resort to “accessibility” options to get to the end of a game. There is no option to change difficulty in Sleeping Dogs so I did wonder if there might be missions that would prove too challenging for me. So far though I have been pleasantly surprised to find that the difficulty curve is pretty much spot on. Sure, I have died a fair bit and fucked up missions and had to start over but I’ve always felt like I was progressing – “Right I got six of those eight gangsters this time, one more push to wipe them all out and complete the drugs bust.”.
The writing in the game is frequently brilliant. There’s a side mission plot where Shen thinks his girlfriend Tiffany is cheating on him – he listens in on her phone calls and follows her to find her indeed meeting another guy for a romantic liaison. At the time I was thinking to myself that Tiffany is only one of three girls I have been involved with – not to mention the “massage parlours” you can visit to boost your face rating, it all seemed a bit hypocritical to me. Right enough, when Shen confronts Tiffany her immediate defence is: “you’ve been cheating on me”! It’s totally non essential (after this mission Tiffany is no longer seen in the main sequence) but I just liked the wee addition to the overall building of Shen’s world, the reminder that our protagonist is a flawed one.
The whole cop vs gangster duality is an interesting one, and I think adds to the main story narrative. I don’t really see Shen as torn between his two very opposing sets of responsibilities but it does lead to a nice mixture of demands for his time / attention. The player is required to suspend their disbelief quite regularly as Shen goes without pausing for breath from carjacking to SWAT operations. Seriously, nobody on the Triad side notices him blazing around town in a police SUV taking out illegal street racers?!
I do think it adds to the overall story but not so much the routine gameplay. At no point did I think to myself “Oh, I better not smash up the city too much as I chase that rival gangster cos it will have a negative impact on my cop rating.”.
Open world games were not original even ten years back when Sleeping Dogs was first released and it’s inevitably going to get compared to the usual suspect – Grand Theft Auto. “GTA in Hong Kong” is a kind of TLDR description of Sleeping Dogs and it’s difficult to argue with that to any great extent. SD is much more focussed on hand to hand combat than GTA which is quite fitting as it is based in a city famous for kung fu cinema. Personally I prefer the focus on melee rather than gunplay. The cop angle is also different to GTA where all the protagonists are on the other side of the law.
In conclusion I just need to say it again: I love this game! Sleeping Dogs to me absolutely nails the blend and balance needed for a strong open world experience. It doesn’t do everything perfectly and for me personally having the whole of Hong Kong speaking English really breaks the immersion but it does do a very good job of what it sets out to – an open world action adventure, heavily focused on hand to hand combat in the bustling neon lit streets of Hong Kong. Don’t sleep on it!
-Calum