Sleeping Dogs.

I know gaming isn't really my scene quite like movies are, but since Sleeping Dogs is a brand new game I thought I'd review it. Enjoy!

So everyone knows the story behind Sleeping Dogs right? It was supposed to be the next instalment of the True Crime series but got cancelled because of high development costs and the fact that the market for open world games changed so much in the long development time the game went through, six months later Square Enix picked it up and renamed it Sleeping Dogs because they didn't purchase the True Crime name rights. And here we are.

The reaction from the critics was a positive one, with critics praising how the game combines the best part of different games, the story was praised and the mission variation was praised as well. But it hasn't been all positive, there have been some criticisms with the facial animations and a lack of creativity. What did I think? Well let's dig into Sleeping Dogs!

Sleeping Dogs is about a guy called Wei Shen, a guy trapped in a by the numbers undercover cop drama set in a fictionalised version of Hong Kong. The story feels oddly disconnected from the gameplay itself. We're supposed to believe that Wei is getting more and more wrapped up in this gang life, slowly becoming like a real member and he is torn by that and his duty as a police officer. To truly hit the message home, after Wei awakes from his nightmares I step outside, get in my illegally bought vehicle, drive along the pavement murdering twenty people, before I turn the corner and use a shotgun to murder the thugs hanging around there. Cant you just see how torn Wei is? From a gameplay perspective Wei doesn't seem torn at all. This is true with a lot of of aspects of the game, in the story there is like a civil war brewing, literally the streets are on the very tip of falling into chaos, it is a race again time.... but first I'm going to go on a date, help someone commit fraud and go sing some karaoke. Plus, as always with these games, it's open world so the story is shattered into tiny little fragments and scattered all around the place, I struggle to have any emotional investment in open world games because the story is delivered so slowly, and it's impossible to provide any real consistent tone or tension. It also probably doesn't help that the story doesn't have a single original idea in its body. Plus this thing is so extremely poorly paced, I don't know if my copy of the game was broken or I was doing the missions in the wrong order or what, but it felt like huge chunks of story were missing, the thing would jump all over the place, new concepts would be introduced out of nowhere - I could barely follow the thing.

If you are playing this on PC, do yourself a favour and buy a gamepad, Sleeping Dogs controls like arse. Everything feels so clunky and sluggish. The parkour feels like you aren't even in control and the animations in the combat are so delayed it's easy to think you aren't in control there either. The sheer monotony of the combat doesn't help either, although there are weapons and environmental attacks you can use which are pretty fun, combat is literally two buttons, and considering how many enemies can auto-counter grapples and how many enemies can literally block every attack you throw, you're more than likely just gonna be sat there tapping the right mouse button repeatedly, for hours, because counters are the only things enemies can't block. It isn't easy either, which also takes a lot of the fun away, because you don't have time to relax and experiment, you often get ganged up on by quite a large number of guys, all of which take a fair amount of damage before going down which just means fight sequences can go on for what feels like forever and it's just so boring.

Thankfully the driving is much, much better even with a keyboard the driving is just great. I'd get so distracted between missions, I could just drive around for hours. That being said, dodgy camera angles and the lack of a reset button can lead to some frustrating races, the amount of times I'd get caught out by a bad camera angle, going into the back of a car and then watching as I drop to the bottom of the race as I attempt to slowly reverse and get back into it.

However the truly worst aspect of Sleeping Dogs is its gunplay - Jesus Christ, I have never used a worse shooting system. I'm playing on PC, so I don't know about consoles, but it is brutally over sensitive, trying to aim is practically an impossibility, one tap on the mouse and Wei starts twirling around like a ballerina. Plus for whatever reason holding a gun turns the camera to shit. And the camera is already piss poor. Thankfully gun segments are rare. And admittedly since they are so rare, a gun can really tip the balance of a fight. Taking a gun to one of the hundreds of brawls in this game can have a fight that could kill you, end in a matter of seconds, it's quite a rush.

Sleeping Dogs comes with some light RPG elements too. Completing Triad Missions unlocks and helps you progress through one skill tree and completing Police Missions helps you unlock and progress through another allowing you a limited, but nonetheless existing way to add skills to your character to suit your style of play. There are also girlfriends, although nothing like what Mess Effect had, but dating them does wield some slightly better results than an awkward dry hump. There are also bonuses for making complete outfits and the ability to learn more martial arts moves and other such things.

There is another system, 'Face', which is basically a rep system you get for helping people out and other such side missions. On the one hand Face is a blessing...on the other a curse. Face is basically there to give you a reason to do side missions, and stick around - if everything unlocks too fast on a sandbox game it really gives you less of a reason to come back. But my God you level up slowly, I mean you can easily be up to the last few Face levels half way through the game, but that is at the expense of bringing the story to a grinding halt so you can put a several hour sitting completely into side missions. And I'm really not sure how much the unlockables are worth it...I mean the higher Face level the better shit you can get (plus you get like health benefits and a guy who delivers you vehicles and so on) but since this is a serious game, a lot of the fun is taken out of it - I mean there are a few sillyish costumes and so on, but for the most part it's just you've levelled up, now your clothes can be made from a more expensive material! Why work toward that?

There are of course mini-games too, nearly all of which are terrible. There are uninspired activities like karoke, which just involves you moving up and down with the arrow keys to the hilariously easy cop hacking and bug placing minigames - both of which require no skill and just involve guessing until you get it right. Just awful. I mean there are loads more, but they are all so shit I can't be bothered to waste my time describing them.

Although the fictionalised, down-scaled Hong Kong of Sleeping Dogs is a vibrant world, full of life that looks great, the people in it...leave a lot to be desired. The biggest problem with games that try and look realistic is that computer graphics...just don't look realistic leaving lots of the characters in this to look more like action figures than human beings. It also goes from slightly creepy, to simply annoying how many times you see the same face on one street, or how many people can say the same audio clip in one minute - with bonus points when the clip doesn't even make sense to its surroundings. Shit like that sure pulls you out of the game. I seriously think there are less than ten character models in the whole thing, and less than five audio clips.

And you know what, despite every single problem I have listed in this review Sleeping Dogs is still probably my favourite open world game and you know why? Focus. I hate open world games, it went from being meh about them, to an actual genuine dislike, mainly in how the quality of open world games is gauged. Namely in the notion that size is all that matters, stepping around the obvious penis joke, this is utter bullshit. Not naming any names for fear of flaming, the best open world games of the last five years (because those are the only ones where I was really old enough to criticise them) have all been praised nearly completely on the back of their 'scale', with everyone ignoring the fact that these games are insanely fucking boring. Yes they all had these huge maps that took hours to go from one side to the other...but they were also almost completely empty too. Some might have the occasional random encounter, some might have weather effects and so on, but for the most part open world games are the game equivalent of Lord of The Rings...you just travel and that is about it - it is just so fucking boring. Sure Sleeping Dogs may have one of the smallest sandboxes in recent memory but that works in Sleeping Dogs favour, for Sleeping Dogs it isn't the size, it's how it uses it (penis jokes are funny!). In Sleeping Dogs there is never a dull moment. Sure the rewards are often superficial but there is always something to do, and almost literally there is something to do around every corner, there is no walking for three hours to get to the next mission, you just turn a corner and there is a mission for you to do, it is also what makes the game so hard to put down, it isn't addictive so much, but it's just you finish one mission and your next is literally across the road, which makes it easy to keep saying 'I'll just do one more mission' and suddenly three more hours have passed. This is also why Sleeping Dog's Hong Kong looks so great, no copy paste trees, no bland shades of brown and mountains to hide draw distance, every location is filled with detail, because there is less of it, there is able to be so much more. Each location has a contrast to the last, it's just a great sandbox, who gives a fuck about how small it is? Its clever design that really pays off.

So do I recommend it? I can't help but feel that Sleeping Dogs is the open world game for people who haven't fallen for the open world craze already. I don't think the GTA, Fallout and Skyrim crowds will get much from Sleeping Dogs as there is actually stuff to do and the game isn't stretched to angel hair thinness over a map that is much larger than necessary and blandly designed in the process (remember how I said I wouldn't name names? Oops) but for everyone else who has had the fair and just complaints of this genre as I have, you will find most of your criticisms answered - sure, it could be a better game, well a lot better... but it's at least a start. Sleeping Dogs feels like the first sandbox game in a very long time that isn't just one long tech demo and one of the first sandbox games in a very long time that doesn't feel like they spent 99% of their dev time making the map big and 1% of their time putting things in in it and on the back of that, I feel like Sleeping Dogs deserves a recommendation on that alone. This may well be the first, and it could be the last sandbox game in a very long time that remembers that first and foremost it is a game, not a virtual tourism simulator, it's just a shame it isn't a better game in the process, but either way...thank you Sleeping Dogs, for putting emphasis on performance and not size. Thank you for not being boring. Thank you for existing. You may well be the closest thing to enjoying an open world title that I ever come to.

Think About It!

-Locke