![]() As you level up you can increase your move set, giving you more reasons to get into fistfights to try them out. This requires you to be alert about who you’re taking on next. Some enemies can’t be grappled while others can grapple you instead. In combat, you can even grapple with some enemies and trigger environmental kills which can be bloody and brutal. Fighting in Sleeping Dogs is visceral and going up against a group of thugs, some of whom are carrying tire irons and butcher knives, feels like you’re in The Raid: Redemption. I’ve seen the combat be compared to the Batman: Arkham series, and while they are similar, Sleeping Dogs is nowhere near as swooping and elegant. The fighting, shooting, and driving all come together to make you feel like you’re the badass lead in a high-octane action movie. ![]() I referred to Fast and Furious in regards to the story, but the comparison carries through to the gameplay as well. Also, and this is not a critique or analysis of the game, but I just wanted to mention that Emma Stone is in this game and if that sounds random to throw in the middle of this review then it’s pretty close to how it feels seeing her pop up in the game. While lines like “ a man who never eats pork buns is never a whole man” are iconic within the Sleeping Dogs community, some of the more extraneous dialogue can be underwhelming. There is one sequence in particular that happens in the back half of the game which is pretty predictable to start, but seeing the characters come together in this scene and witnessing the event that follows filled me with a mixture of emotions that few games ever stirred in me. This obviously puts a lot of pressure on the voice-over work and thankfully the core cast is great at delivery. During the game’s runtime, Wei gets to spend quality time with several other characters and as I said earlier, I was so invested in some of them and their stories that I would put my controller down just to hear them talk. Sleeping Dogs starts with Wei returning to the place he grew up and seeing his interactions with characters both familiar and new is a treat. ![]() To start with writing, there is a lot of influence from other Hong Kong crime stories here, and though Sleeping Dogs never takes itself as seriously as Oldboy or The Man From Nowhere, the setup for the action and the style in which it is presented is intriguing. This is all thanks to both the decent writing that’s often self-aware of its source material and the (mostly) solid voice acting. By the end of the game, I had a pretty good idea of who the villain was, but I was nonetheless excited to see them get what they deserved. I found myself anxious at certain important segments and I would often stop the car as I neared an objective marker so that I could hear the conversations between Wei and the passenger in its entirety. There isn’t much in the way of actual surprises in the game but I was thoroughly invested the entire time. Over the course of the 15-hour campaign Wei, and consequently the player, will be kicking butt, taking names, and having a crisis of identities. You play as Wei Shen, an undercover cop who’s trying to infiltrate the Hong Kong triad to bring them down. ![]() The story of Sleeping Dogs has just the right amount of street races and dialogue about family to make Dominic Toretto happy. It was after this change of publishers that the game shed its old title, and Sleeping Dogs was born. But soon afterward, Activision shut down the project and Square Enix, seeing the potential in what United Front Games was working on, bought the rights, and funded the game’s completion. When it was first revealed the game was called True Crime: Hong Kong, a continuation of the True Crime game series that started with True Crime: Streets of LA in 2003. UFG took over development pretty early on and they buckled down to make a unique open-world game set in Hong Kong and inspired by its culture. Developed by Vancouver-based studio United Front Games and published by Square Enix, the game was originally conceived by Treyarch, home of the Call of Duty: Black Ops series, under the funding of Activision. While games like Saints Row have evolved over a few iterations to carve out their own niche and differentiate themselves, a lot of sandbox games get swept up by the current of constant game releases, only bubbling up at the mention of some fan who remembers it fondly. ![]() This is at no fault to the chart-busting franchise and its developers and is simply a byproduct of its popularity. Whenever a new open-world sandbox game comes out it’s inevitably compared to Grand Theft Auto. ![]()
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