Okay, you should be able to tell from that intro that I kind
of enjoyed the story for this game. In that aspect, Sleeping Dogs is probably
one of the better games I’ve played in a long time. The development of
relationships between various characters, such as old friends, new enemies, and
the general struggle between doing what’s right and what’s legal, would make
for a fantastic film. In that sense, I have no quarrel with the game, and was
honestly surprised by how deep of an experience the game presented, including a
few insights into the psychological trauma experienced by Wei Shen, and a very
nice twist towards the end of the game.
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| Why is it that every martial arts instructor is also a life mentor? |
If you were expecting a huge “But” after that, there is unfortunately
more to a game than just its story, and, as is too often the case in the games
I’ve played lately, this is where I end up docking most of my points. As I
said, Sleeping Dogs is an open world sandbox game set on the island of Hong Kong.
There are four different cities, ranging from the slums where you start out, to
the posh Kennedy side of the island. There is plenty of territory to explore,
and you’ll be rewarded in your searches with hidden items that unlock new
abilities, increase your health, or give you an extra bit of cash. There are
side missions besides your main roll as triad member and police officer, which
would normally have you doing things like investigating a string of murders
connected to the triads, or committing a few murders of your own as revenge.
Clothing, cars, fist fights, gambling, and dates are all various things you can
take advantage of on the side. There is a whole martial arts portion of the
game with an upgrade system that is based on how well you do during missions and
what kind of collectibles you manage to find. Basically, it’s a pretty large
game with plenty to cover. I will attempt to do so now.
Your main missions break down into two categories – Police
and Triad. Generally they take the tone you’d expect, committing vile deeds or
other acts to ingratiate yourself with other members of your gang on Triad
missions, such as hunting down someone who organized an attempted a hit on your
boss, shooting the goons protecting him, and then leaping from your motorcycle
to his car and hijacking it until you can drive him to be talked to by a few of
your friends. While Triad missions are probably the most interesting, the
Police missions aren’t too bad either, and they usually do a pretty good job of
complimenting what you’re doing undercover, such as an early string of missions
where you have to find out why so many members of your gang have been showing
up dead…with some organs missing. In that case it turns out a rival gang has
been abducting your guys and selling their organs on the black market, but it
really isn’t a case the cops care about because they are just gang members,
something which greatly upsets our protagonist. Plus, you need to complete both
types of missions if you’re going to advance in this game.
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| The missions start pretty clear cut but lines get blurry pretty quickly. When reflecting on this screen shot, I had to pause a second to remember if you are functioning as a Police Officer or Triad gang member. |
Side missions come in a variety of flavors. This can be as
simple as taking a girl out on a nice date, after you have met them during the
main missions, with the reward being something useful like marking all the
health shrines you need to visit on your minimap. There a quite a few missions
you can start by calling a contact, and then you’ll be tasked with stealing a
marked car or beating someone up until they agree to pay their debts. You can
compete in various races, both car and motorcycle, so long as you have a
vehicle in that performance class. Add in things like completing all the
fistfight challenges, karaoke songs, drug busts, collectible cash filled
suitcases, health shrines, martial arts move unlocking jade statues, and what
you get is enough content that you can double your play time beyond just the
main missions all while keeping things pretty fresh, though hunting down
suitcases can get a bit tiring after a while, and you kind of wonder why the
heck someone would leave a suitcase filled will 25,000 Hong Kong Dollars
sitting on top of a shipping container in a harbor.
The game does have an XP system that unlocks new abilities,
such as new moves when engaged in a bit of martial arts fighting or the master
key for every police car’s trunk so you can pull out a firearm. Your main
missions will yield Triad and Police XP, but each one works differently. Triad
XP starts at 0, and fills based on the violence of the actions you take. Using
weak punches or the same take down over and over again results in diminishing
returns. Mix it up by using the environment in your favor, such as a
conveniently placed meat hook or table saw, different styles or attacks, or
alternating between shooting out the tires of someone pursuing you instead of
always going for a regular kill will all drastically increase your end of
mission score. Police XP is pretty much the opposite of Triad XP, because it
starts full and the actions you take will only reduce it. What is kind of odd
about it is that it doesn’t matter how violent or dirty you fight with the
other gang members, but rather how careful you are about not injuring
civilians, damaging property, or missing a jump when fleeing someone on foot
(it’s -5 points for being clumsy). Basically, to do the best possible, you’ll
need to make sure each bullet is a headshot, you don’t crash into someone
else’s car, and when you’re chasing someone down to beat him senseless you time
your jumps right.
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| Environmental attacks, like forcing someone's face into a running table saw, is a great way to score some extra points - about double that of a normal "hostile down." |
There is actually a third type of XP in this game, called
Face. You don’t gain Face on your main missions, but rather on your side
missions. Still, the rewards are more than worth it, with some helping during
combat, such as when your combat meter fills your attacks become unstoppable
for a short duration, and others being great to have the rest of the time, such
as a valet that will bring you a motorcycle on demand. As your Face level
increases, you’ll also gain access to extra items to purchase. The game does
have a several vehicles and clothing items available. Cars and motorcycles come
in a variety of classes, which indicate their speed, and you’ll need one car of
each class if you want to complete all the racing events the game has to offer.
Note that, while in certain games like the Grand Theft Auto series, you can
simply steal a car you like and park it in your garage to save it, that is not
the case here. Cars are always purchased, and your collection can be accessed
at any garage in the city. Clothes also can provide a benefit, besides just
changing how cool you look. Certain articles of clothing are used in a set, so
that if you wear the shirt, pants, and shoes of a certain suit you can unlock a
bonus. An increase to melee damage can be nice, but it’s perhaps better to
equip yourself with a percent increase to XP gained, and then switch clothes
with a customized preset so what you’re wearing matches the type of mission
you’re about to do. This is extremely helpful for the Triad XP, especially when
you combine it with the ability to replay missions to beat your score and gain
more XP, because the Triad XP is much more difficult to max out than Police is.
Leveling and missions aside, most of what you’ll be doing
involves beating people senseless. The combat is both interesting and extremely
boring at the same time. You spend much of the game without access to a
firearm, instead relying on martial arts moves to pummel opponents. Here you’ll
simply smash your attack buttons a few times, coming up with some combination
of light and heavy attacks, while occasionally countering. Some of the combos
are interesting, such as two light attacks and then a arm breaking heavy attack
that provides a huge boost to your in combat face meter, or three light attacks
and an leg break that leaves an enemy stunned for a short period of time,
allowing a follow up attack. There are unfortunately a few problems with these
combos, the biggest one being that the game tends to flood you with enough enemies
at one time that you are unable to ever take much advantage of them. It is a
bit difficult to go more than 2 or 3 punches without being attacked yourself,
particularly when you’re surrounded by 8 or 9 enemies. Perhaps a system a
little more like Assassin’s Creed or, better yet, another Square Enix title,
Batman: Arkham Asylum would better suit itself to the melee portions of the
game.
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| Just try and get a 5 hit combo off with this many enemies around. |
There are a few ways of (*sigh*) combating this issue with
combat. Weaponized combat does exist, either by picking up items that other
enemies drop, such as a butcher's knife, or a shopping bag that you grabbed
from a person you ran into, to tire irons you find in the trunk of most
vehicles. Most weapons are only good for a few swings before you throw them
away, though this was never really explained, so make sure to use them wisely,
preferably on the big opponents that tend to block your punches and prove to be
difficult to counter. Perhaps the best thing to do to speed up combat is to
utilize your environment. Grapple an enemy, either something you can do
outright, or while some of the larger bad guys are stunned or your Face meter
is full, and you can do a variety of things besides simply beat them more or
attempt to pull off a grapple combo. Running your opponent into a wall is
always nice, but it’s the special things around you that you’ll want to focus
on, since many items provide one hit kills, such as a table saw, electrical
panel, ventilation fan, or even a telephone booth. You’ll also be rewarded with
major Triad XP during missions if you utilize these environmental attacks.
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| Special environmental attack objects flash red when you grapple an enemy. In this picture alone you have the option between using the pallet of sword fish heads, a tank of electric eels, or a dumpster, all of which are one hit kills. |
You can occasionally gain access to a firearm as well, which
either will be given to you during part of a mission, or something you’ll have
to find or steal during the open world portions of the game. This can greatly
increase the ease in dealing with groups of thugs, particularly on drug bust
side missions, which involve clearing out a large group of enemies (I recall
one was about 20 guys), hacking a surveillance camera, and then going back to
your place and calling the cops when the drug dealer shows up next time. Still,
problems persist, and fire arms aren’t necessarily the end all solution that Hollywood and many other
video games would make them out to be. Probably the largest problem is
something that plagues all aspects of this game – the controls. Coming from a
shooter background, I’ve got certain expectations about aiming, movement,
damage, and so forth, that should be associated with a firearm. While Sleeping
Dogs is a third person game, and thus the shooting portions are as well, even
couched in those terms the game doesn’t handle the way I’d expect. Part of the
difficulty aiming comes from the default control setup, with Shift being your
aim key, as opposed to just blindly firing. This is somewhat mitigated by the
slow motion that activates while you vault over cover, and which can be
continued so long as you score headshot after headshot. Still, after playing
this game for so long, I just could not shake the feeling that something about
the shooting feels off.
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| You can actually find firearms long before the game instructs you how to use them, so you won't initially know about things like aiming, or that you can vault over cover directly into someone and disarm them. The red explosive containers are a bit more self explanatory. |
Continuing with the “there are control problems in this
game” theme I’m attempting to establish, I’ll move onto the issue of driving in
this game. This issue isn’t exactly specific to this game, as anyone who has
ever played, say, Grand Theft Auto 4 can tell you, but driving in these kinds
of games really, really sucks, which is really bad when that makes up such a
large portion of the game. Cars have no handling, turn wide, have little
response, and so many other issues that I’m tempted to utter some clichés about
gouging out my eyes with rusty utensils. The traffic is an issue too, mostly in
that it always seems to move so slow it’s constantly in your way, except for
when you’re chasing down a taxi because you want to take advantage of the
game’s only means of fast travel (why doesn’t Face XP unlock that as a bonus to
go with the valet?), and since you can’t turn to save your life you’re bound to
broadside more than a few cars, which tends to be a problem when property
damage will ding you Police XP. The one thing the creators of this game really
got right in regards to driving though is the music choices. This isn’t, and I
hate to continue making comparisons to this, another GTA game with a fake
soundtrack, ranging from generic sound pop music to an over the top satirical
take on talk radio as some host rants about Al Qaeda’s Mexican branch, Al Con
Queso. No, the music in this game is real, the exact kind of thing you’d likely
hear on the radio. Want classic rock? You’ll find The Who playing. Be a hipster
with Kerrang! Radio’s collection of indie music, or catch some country on
Daptones Radio. Pop, electronica, and plenty more are there. Just want some
classical to calm down to? Listen to Fur Elise by Beethoven as you run enemies
down in your car, which is actually one of my preferred combat tactics for a
melee fight, like a drug bust, since, you know, melee combat kind of sucks.
There are actually enough songs in the game, when you add in things like the
karaoke music, that I’m certain part of the reason for Square’s financial
difficulties must be the huge licensing costs associated with this game, though
the inclusion of several “big name” actors who take up roles in this can’t have
helped with production costs either.
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| You even get real music on a boat! Also, these are the only vehicles I feel handle somewhat realistically in the game. |
One final rant before I move onto the conclusion and wrap
this game review up. This game does have a lot of issues with how well the
controls feel. The shooting doesn’t quite feel right compared to true third
person shooters. Vehicles don’t control with the same responsiveness that
dedicated car games have, even ridiculous ones like Burnout Paradise. Melee
combat is okay, but simplistic, and while there are advanced moves, like
locking onto one direction and using your directional keys to attack to the
side or behind you, the reality of being flooded with enemies makes those things
impractical. Even the freestyle running portions of the game feel clumsy, as
you have to hold down a key to run anyways, yet press that again to not fumble
a jump, though if you take your finger off the key you’ll start to slow down.
Some of these issues might just stem from how well the game was ported over to
PC, which in some cases works like you expect, but in others, such as menus,
fails miserably (I want to use Esc to back out of menus, and never, ever have
to use the arrow keys, Enter, and Delete to navigate anything). It should seem
obvious, but the ability to intuitively control an in game character, and have
that character respond in a manner to which you have grown accustomed, is kind
of a big deal, even if that character is a simple cursor on a menu. /end rant
Despite the problems with this game, and obviously, there
are more than just a few, most of which will land Wei Shen in the hospital and
down a few thousand dollars, Sleeping Dogs is actually a pretty good game. If I
were to replay it, I’d think I’d much rather stick to the main story and get
through things a little quicker, because that portion of the game is pretty
much golden. Unfortunately, you really do need to do things like take Emma
Stone out on a date, which involves taking tons of pictures of her, just to
make it easier to find the health shrines you’ll need to survive poorly
constructed melee fights. This is also one of those games that suffers from too
much DLC syndrome, with 26 pieces ranging from the rig punishing free hi texture
pack (one of only a handful of games that brings my computer to its knees), to
new outfits, to extra XP you can buy for real life money, to some actual
mission content. You’ll have to really look through the DLC options to find
something that might be worthwhile, and I passed on the whole lot because I
didn’t want to spend more on DLC than on the base game, which you should
probably look at getting when it’s around $7.50 (I got it at $6.24 during a
Summer Sale). All in all, I put about 32 hours into Sleeping Dogs, and
generally enjoyed most of it, enough so that, with ample considerations to the
difficulties the game maintains, I’m still okay recommending you buy it – 8 out
of 10.
So, the final breakdown:
Score: 8/10
Suggested Price: $7.50
*****
For more Sleeping Dogs,
check out this collection of screenshots unused in the rest of the review.
Click on one to enlarge it.
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