Sleeping Dogs

Shamefully, it took me a long while between purchasing this game and playing it as it did get a lot of good reviews and, more importantly, was recommended to me by several people.

Sleeping Dogs follows the story of Wei Chen, an undercover cop going balls deep in the triad in order to destroy the drug trade in Hong Kong. He has at his disposal; the ability to kick anyone’s ass; the ability to carry just one gun at a time; awesome driving skills and more mojo than Austin Powers.

Everyone seems to think that Wei is on the verge of joining to triad and chucking in the cop scene despite your in-game actions of making loads of drug busts, killing rival gang members and avoiding hurting members of the public.

To be honest, about half Wei through the game, I wouldn’t have blamed Wei if he had gone triad. All the police types seem to hate him and think he is a loose cannon and all the Triads give you nothing but praise. But Wei is a man of his word and sees his undercover stuff through to the end, partly because one of the Tried dudes knobbed his sister or something.

I don’t want to focus too much on the story because it is very much worth playing the game through to see this for yourself. I found it very immersive and Wei is a likable chap in some ways.

Aside from his police colleagues, Wei also manages to generate a lot of dislike from the female population of Hong Kong. Basically he will meet a girl, bang her, meet another girl, bang her and so on. Some girls completely disappear from the game, others get kidnapped and sold and some find out about each other and give Wei a hard time. I thought he was a lad until one mission where you have to follow one of your supposed girlfriends because someone reckons she is cheating on you. When he confronts her, she is like, ‘So what? You are slagging it with that tramp from that other place.’ And Wei is like, ‘Baby that was for work.’ And I was like, ‘No Wei did you just use that excuse!’

The game itself it a face-paced version of Grand Theft Auto and there is nothing wrong at all with that. The open world is well designed and also not overly large. I mean, it’s large enough for you to spend a considerable amount of time exploring but no so big that will resent having to drive to the next town. In addition, you can explore nearly the entire map from the outset which is great.

A lot of work has gone into the visuals and the various locations are intricately designed. That said a lot of the scenery can be problematic when exploring and I found I had a lot of issues with invisible walls when trying to get the collectibles. But it does look nice.

Sound effects can be broken down into two categories; voiceovers and music. The voiceovers are really good. The actors seem to buy in and invest in the story which is great and just adds to the immersive nature of the game. On the flip side, the music is atrocious. It’s not so much that the focus is on J-Pop (and everything sounds very Japanese), it’s the fact that it is almost completely broken. In the latter stages of the game, I found that the radio got stuck and was repeating the same 30 seconds of one song over and over again. As you can imagine, this was mind-destroying.

As it’s a Grand Theft Auto clone, there are several elements to the game play. The first one you are introduced to is free-running. The game opens with an action sequence at the end of which Wei gets arrested. You have to run through a market place, jumping over things, sliding under things, jumping over walls, jumping through windows and it is very effective for setting up the kind of gaming experience on offer.

There are also the standard driving and shooting elements but the way these combine is great for a game, but less so for realism. Wei can use a submachine while driving, looking behind him and is accurate enough to shoot out tyres at over 500 metres away as well as shooting guys off of motorcycles. Seriously cool – but not realistic. Not that it’s a major issue of course.

Aside from the GTA gameplay elements, Sleeping Dogs offers a greatly improved hand-to-hand combat experience. You can teach Wei new moves at the Dojo making him an unbeatable Bruce Lee style physical specimen. Once you have learned all of his moves, gunplay becomes obsolete and you can destroy everyone with your fists of fury.

The one major complaint I have about the game is the Wei in which the camera reacts when I’m trying to do intricate driving. For some reason the game assumes that when I touch the accelerator, I want to be looking straight ahead of me despite the fact I had just manually adjusted the camera to look in the direction I actually wanted to be looking in. It was so frustrating. Bad camera angles really kill a game for me. Fortunately, Sleeping Dogs was very good aside from this.

Achievements – 1,225 Points – 59 Achievements

Sleeping Dogs offers a lot of variety on the achievement front. The main story only accounts for eight of them leaving lots of scope. Outside of the main story, you can collect the vast majority by completing the skills. One of the overarching achievements is for getting gold in all your skills and this is where it gets a bit drawn out for the achievement hunters.

One of the gold medals is given for driving for thirty minutes at maximum speed. You cannot get a car capable of doing the maximum speed until later in the game (some crazy people may argue against this but it’s not easy) and the only way you can realistically drive for thirty minutes is to do laps of the freeway. It will more than likely be the last thing you do.

Another thing that is slightly tricky and repetitive is the Ultimate Fighter achievement. This requires you to get all of the Triad upgrades and this can only realistically be done by replaying the story missions, once Wei has learned more skills, to maximise your Triad scores.

There was nothing majorly difficult with the remainder of the game, it’s just time consuming -  but an enjoyable time consuming experience is fine with me.

Downloadable Content

Sleeping Dogs has two DLCs on offer which give you an extended playing experience. The Year of the Snake shows Wei take on some weird cultists as a beat cop. The achievements here are not too bad, the most taxing being finding all the evidence bags.

Nightmare in North Point is just plain bizarre. Supposedly, it’s a Halloween style level where everyone in North Point turns into Zombies and you have to take down the reincarnated spirit of some guy who was turned into catfood. It’s not in keeping with the rest of the game and I completely switched off from this.

This DLC comes with an extra five skills to get gold awards with and once again will have you driving around for an inexcusable amount of time looking for enemies to kill. The game had stopped being fun at this point, mainly due to the nature of the DLC than anything.

Despite the Nightmare in North Point DLC, I had a good time with Sleeping Dogs. I thought it was a very well executed game that didn’t try to do too much and achieved the right balance between story and gameplay. It tried to shoot itself in the foot with its DLC offerings and the camera behaviour while driving but only than that it’ a solid game.