Brutal Fun
“Sleeping Dogs” manages to be a game without a single trace of innovation or any sense of personality and still be an amazingly fun experience. The game has not a single shred of originality. The fighting is taken from Rocksteady´s Batman games. The shooting from Max Payne. The clothes and cars from Saints Row. The story from every cheesy B movie about undercover cops with a touch of Kung-Fu thrown in. What is surprising about all this is how masterfully the developer, United Front Games, manages to tie all these elements together to create a highly satisfying mix.
The fighting is visceral, brutal and so gratifying you will spend hours just beating goons up all over town. Once you learn the key to the combat, blocking, and unlock more fighting moves, Wei Shen, our character becomes an unstoppable fighting machine and its just a blast to destroy waves of enemies, breaking arms and legs and pushing people into all sorts of deadly environmental traps like stoves. Yes you can push some poor bastard´s face into a burning stove. Charming. Wei can also use all sorts of fun melee weapons like cleavers, crowbars, tire irons and of course knifes. In one of the final missions a machete comes into play in a most enjoyable sequence. There is also shooting which is decent enough but never as amazing as the melee. Still while the shooting is average, with the same old cover system, Wei can leap in slow motion over obstacles and rain down death with time slowed down and people just falling dead all around him.
“Sleeping Dogs” is just a spectacle of violence and mayhem. Even in the cutscenes the game manages to push the blood and realistic brutality to new and incredible heights. Unfortunately the story fails to engage which is perhaps the game´s biggest flaw. Wei Shen is a very likable protagonist but the plot never seems to rise above mediocrity and never seems to have a clear direction. Time seems to move without the player´s knowledge, relationships grow off-screen and while in the previous mission a character suspected Wei was a cop and was ready to kill him without mercy in the next mission they are best friends. Wei´s rise in the triads while working undercover is also meteoric without any sort of effort to explain how quickly these hardened criminals are to trust Shen with so much and how easily he gets to the “top of the food-chain”. I understand that its not fun to play as a lowly thug (yes GTA IV i´m talking about you) or to clean urinals as part of a mission (why Mafia 2, why????) but the way after only a few missions Wei has made contact with all of the triad´s bosses is going too far.
The main draw of SD is the open world. The missions are short, a bit on the easy side and only really pick up in the final third of the game. The rest of the missions are average mixing fighting and shooting with some car chases but without a good plot as motivation it all falls a bit flat.
The open world however is lots of fun even if not original. We have the usual activities, like car and bike races and hidden collectibles which are easy to find and after a few side missions even show up on your map to help you. The side missions are also the usual stuff, like stealing cars and driving them back to a garage or maybe romance some girls in a few silly missions which fade to black when Wei is getting “the goods” and then the girls never show up again and there´s no development whatsoever to these relationships. You can also do some “drug busts” that involves beating a bunch of enemies and then hack a camera with a pointless mini-game (one of many put there just to make you waste time). Then you drive home and watch the feed on your tv and point out the main dealer and cops arrest them and you get more cop xp. Yes there´s an upgrade system here and in pretty much every game in the world these days. You have cop upgrades and triad upgrades but they are pointless. What you want is the melee upgrades which unlock more and devastating moves and are acquired by finding jade statues and getting them back to your old “master” to learn the moves. The cop and triad upgrades offer little value in the gameplay and are more of a “me too” feature. There are also a few police investigations you can pursue using your triad contacts and they are fun, with little plots that are actually interesting and well written but they are small side missions that end too quickly. Still I enjoyed these “cases” immensely.
The rest of the features are also competent enough. The cars are more arcade than realistic and they are fun to drive and you can buy them all and have different paint-jobs. You can drive as an absolute maniac and kill all the pedestrians you wish! We all do in these games, you know it! Here the police is a small nuisance at best. You can easily escape them and create more havoc and destruction.
You also acquire a few safe houses, from a dump early in the game to a high class apartment later to show Wei´s rise in the triads and you can even customize them somewhat by buying some furniture but its all very basic to be honest. There are loads of clothes to buy and make Wei look ridiculous or tough or classy or just goofy. The soundtrack is Asian but not “too much” with enough international flavor. The graphics are good with a few glitches here and there, which is expected with open world games and the models are highly detailed and charismatic. Wei Shen especially was just excellent design. The voice acting is of superior quality with a special mention to Will Yun Lee which is just magnificent as Wei Shen.
The city could be bigger but its full of personality and detail. I felt like I really was in Hong Kong and I think that´s the biggest compliment you can give an open world game.
“Sleeping Dogs” is “good enough” in everything it does. You might say it doesn't excel in nothing but in return its never bad in anything. Its a game that “plays it safe”. It takes ideas from other titles and reproduces them with care and competence. It needed a better story and a bit of audacity, flair and originality to reach higher. As it stands its a satisfying, fun and remarkable action game and one that i´m happy got released and that I enjoyed thoroughly.