The only GTA like game I've ever played is Red Dead, but it's easily one of the best games I've played this generation. I gave it a shot initially because I had never played anything western themed. I'm particularly put off by the idea of doing whatever in a GTA like game, but I've heard Sleeping Dogs is like a good kung fu movie. I might give this a shot, but I'm not ready for something that's going to last 40 or so hours. I'm looking for a nice 25 hour game. It's fine if its a bit shorter than that.

Depends on if you do all the sidequests or not but I think my mains story completion was about 15 hours.

If you stick to the story and don't dick around doing side stuff, you could probably finish in that time, maybe even less. I did almost all of the side stuff, and Steam has 34 hours played for me.

@Tearhead: steams playtime isnt really accurate because it counts the pause time, the launch time, ect...

On topic, im not sure how long it takes i spent a good bit of time dicking around.

When I saw the thread title, I thought that @golguin would be hoping for a long game rather than a short one, so I came in ready to say 'yeah, it is pretty short, but try it anyway, it's great.' If you're actually hoping for it to be on the short side, then absolutely go for it. I have 35 hours clocked up, which includes doing every single side activity I could find, lots of repeats of re-doable missions, quite a lot of aimless driving/sailing around and lots of benchmark/menu fiddling. You could knock 20 hours off that if you were to just plough ahead with the story.

I completed most of what the game had to offer at about 25 hours.

Took me around 11 hours but I barely did any of the side stuff. Still happy with my purchase though as the main-line is great.

I beat it in about 12 hours but it wasn't a very thorough run. I can't see anyone getting more than 30 out of one playthrough, though, and that's a stretch.

If you dive straight through it without side stuff Id say the high teens like 15 or 16.

It took me 40 hours to S-rank it and complete the Nightmare DLC.

15 to 20 hours seems like a good estimate for an average playthrough, assuming you're doing a good deal, but not all, of the side content.

I got the platinum for the game and my game clock was at ~32:00 hours. I fucked around a lot causing mayhem on the streets and did a few hours of grinding to get some of the achievements. Its definitely nowhere near as long as RRD. You can play that game forever, there's no random events in the environment and no compelling mini-games like poker.

Its just about the only open world game with a great storyline (aside from Mafia 2 and Red Dead (which could have been around 5 hours shorter if they cut out the mexico section)), and the combat mechanics are pretty awesome (if sometimes a bit twitchy). I split my time pretty much 50/50 between main storyline and side missions and clocked up 35 hours or so. Didn't finish everything mind. Plenty of content in there.