Sleeping Dogs is a crime drama set in the land of Hong Kong. The protagonist is Wei Shen, an undercover cop who is a native of Hong Kong but spent some years in the U.S. working for the San Francisco Police Department. Wei Shen is trying to avenge the death of his sister by infiltrating the Sun On Yee triad gang, trying to take it down from the inside little by little. He is, however, caught between a rock and a hard place because his behavior can make gang members suspect he’s a cop and other times his behavior makes the HKPD think he’s too attached to the Sun On Yee. It makes for part of an interesting narrative.
Sleeping Dogs is an open world game like The Grand Theft Auto series and the Saints Row series. But it doesn’t start out that way since you begin very slowly, learning the basic moves of melee combat. Melee combat is more important in this game than gunplay. You have to go through martial arts training in order to advance against more difficult foes later in the game. The combos you learn are quite impressive and the bone-breaking animations look very realistic. What makes the melee combat even more fun is the environments giving you ample opportunity to creatively kill your foes. You can throw an enemy into a dumpster, thrown an enemy into a phone booth, or impale an enemy onto a nearby meat hook.
Hong Kong is a country that shows plenty of life and culture. You see local businessmen cooking pork buns, fish, and other foods for you to buy and eat. You find merchants selling different articles of clothing for you to buy and wear giving you an assortment of clothes for you to wear at any time. There are some problems with character animations, as they can look unnatural when walking and when expressing gestures and there is some clipping. You can find dancers performing at street festivals, making the gameworld look alive. Neon signs are hanging from the outcropping on busy streets with glowing Chinese characters. The gameworld encourages a lot of exploration after completing a few story missions since you can find collectibles scattered around the island. Collectibles include lock boxes, health shrines, and rare jade statues. Lock boxes can contain cash and articles of clothing. Praying at a health shrine increases your maximum health. Jade statues are necessary to improve your melee combat in the four martial arts schools.
The story missions are not boring because they provide different types of gameplay. While most of the gameplay focuses on melee combat there is enough variety to entertain you like a Hong Kong action film. Sometimes you will have to jump from one vehicle to another to accomplish a goal. There will be shootouts with some gang members from the 18K. The guns are always provided to you since there are no stores for purchasing firearms. The shootouts are fun in that you can vault over boxes and tables to enter into slow motion combat. In later missions you will learn to shoot out tires of vehicles of enemy pursuers and it is thrilling to see those pursuers flying in the air. The side missions add plenty of replayability to the game. Side missions include hacking spy cameras in order for the police to capture a drug supplier in that particular zone. Other side missions require you to solve specific cases that would otherwise go cold. The A.I. in some of the story and side missions can be problematic, as some non-player characters can inexplicably run into walls. This bad A.I. can make the gameplay lack credibility.
There is a great variety of vehicles for your ride around Hong Kong. Many of the cars are lot of fun to ride during story missions and side missions. The music only adds to the excitement and rush you feel in your activities. Like the Grand Theft Auto series, there are many radio stations to choose from and many songs to choose from. There’s music like hip-hop, rock-and-roll, Chinese love songs, and techno songs.
Some story and side missions will require you to use modern technology to solve crimes such as hacking into computers, tracing a cell phone signal, cracking a safe, and calibrating bugs. The hacking is a lot of fun and adds another dimension to the gameplay. There is the opportunity to sing karaoke inside nightclubs. Karaoke minigames can be funny because your performance depends on how good you are moving an arrow up and down as green bars scroll horizontally along a track. A bad performance can be quite amusing because it shows how far off you are from the song’s beats.
There are opportunities for you to increase your durability by purchasing the foods and drinks from the local vendors and vending machines. You can also pay for massages from the females in the back-alley parlors. There are cop experience and triad experience points you can earn throughout the game by completing the story missions. The missions emphasize the importance of minimizing property damage and innocent casualties. The triad experience points add to Wei’s melee abilities whereas cop experience improves Wei’s ability to fire guns and drive cars. The triad experience points and cop experience points, along with the jade statues collected give the game a little bit of an RPG feel.
There are plenty of extracurricular activities in the game such as betting on cockfights and playing poker mahjong in a gambling barge that requires you to sail by boat. The game’s DLCs also add many extracurricular activities such as the Zodiac Tournament. The Zodiac Tournament makes you sail to a remote island so that you can fight different levels of enemies until the end. It has the feel of a 1970s martial arts action film. The tournament is challenging enough that it requires you to build on your triad experience points and melee training if you are willing to go far at all. Other notable DLCs include Nightmare in North Point and Year of the Snake. Nightmare in North Point is like a survival horror film set in the North Point district of Hong Kong where all thugs are possessed and all enemies are the undead. Year of the Snake is all about the Chinese New Year and there is one man who wants to cause havoc in Hong Kong who needs to be stopped.
I think Sleeping Dogs is an outstanding game with a lot of replay value, diverse gameplay, and encourages plenty of exploration. I wish the problems with character animations and the occasionally poor A.I. had been patched up before the game’s release. But the game is still fun.