Porecomesis Reviews: Sleeping Dogs

Porecomesis

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Well, this is most certainly new of me. Being a big fan of fantastic settings that break away from realism, I never thought I'd find myself playing Sleeping Dogs of all things. I didn't exactly want this game in the first place; to me, it just seemed like Grand Theft Auto: Hong Kong Edition which meant that I could just play a Grand Theft Auto game for ten or so hours, review it and then point to it and go "It's pretty much that". Still, I like to think that I'm more professional than that despite writing these reviews on a poorly designed blog and, well, if a royal food tester has to keep doing their job even though they get enough poison in their bodies to take out an entire third-world country, I think I can take some time out to play a triple-A game for a change rather than all this indie and obscure stuff. That, and a friend also asked me to review this game so I thought I'd oblige.

Sleeping Dogs is the story of Wei Shen, a police officer working under a British jerk by the name of Pendrew who has a jerk proxy by the name of Raymond, who has been tasked to take down the Sun On Yee from within by acting as a rat. As time goes on, however, Shen begins to grow into his new life and he finds himself torn between the bond he grows to share with his new brothers and the justice he is sworn to serve. "Well," I thought, "this will be interesting. Given that I have Triad XP and Police XP as my main methods of levelling up, I don't suppose I'll be able to influence if Wei inevitably takes the side of the Triads or the Police?" Turns out this isn't the case. This is not your story, my friend; this is Wei's story and Wei's alone. I don't mind linearity but this here is a golden opportunity ten planets wide to have the player's actions have long-term consequences but they missed it so bad that I'm almost certain they were aiming in the opposite direction. It's a shame, really; it's interesting how you start with full Police XP at every mission but you lose it by committing transgressions and the Triad XP is gained through actions but the idea never gets taken anywhere.


This system could have had story-related consequences but it doesn't.​

One thing I do mind with the story is its bias. Sleeping Dogs seems to be tilting in favour of the gangs, seeing as the police are primarily portrayed as jerks and the gang members primarily as brotherhood-honouring comrades even when they're cutting people's hands off. Now, I understand that there can be a lot of shady behind-the-scenes stuff going on in the line of police work like corruption and I also understand that being a gang member doesn't automatically make you a bad person, so judgements shouldn't be made on occupations alone and it's good to get this into the light rather than just have authority equals good, criminal syndicate equals evil like a certain game did (I promised myself I'd stop bringing it up because it's boring even to me now). However, this isn't really making the playing field shades of grey; this is just reversing the sides, making authority equal evil and criminal syndicate equal good. Okay, the game never goes that far and both sides have their own jerks and saints but there is definitely a hint of bias in here that I have to bring up lest the developers get carried away like other games do.

Now for the gameplay. Its core is where the Grand Theft Auto-clone accusations will come in full force. While I could use a different term for an open-world game set in a modern city traversed via pedestrian vehicles to get you from one slightly repetitive side mission to the next, it's just easier to call it a Grand Theft Auto clone. Well, to be fair, it does have several key deviations, like how it also rips off Assassin's Creed with a parkour mechanic, although it's contextual as hell. The most you will ever use it for on a regular basis is climbing things because this isn't 12th century Jerusalem where the buildings are all one meter away from each other and suspended platforms are everywhere. You'll only ever do anything major like rapid-fire hurdle jumping when the game puts you in one of its obligatory on-ground chase scenes which, like the main story, feel rather railroaded. One time, I was chasing this guy and I flying kicked his backside when he was close enough. Even though I saw my foot travel right through the prick's face, he still kept running until he got to a dead end where I would inevitably fight him and his mooks. There are like four or five of these chase sequences throughout the main story, each one more scripted than the last. It got to the point where, when I got into another chase scene in a sidequest and I happened to have a pistol on me, I just shot out the guy's legs to save me the trouble.


Gotta go fast!​

The two modes of combat in Sleeping Dogs are melee and guns and the game proves to be even more creative by ripping off Batman: Arkham Asylum with the former aspect. Okay, that's not really fair: in addition to your attack and counter buttons, you can also grapple enemies and use power attacks by holding the attack button down. While it is fun and it flows well, the melee combat is too easy and I went through every single fight without dying once because, unless you're blind, deaf and dumb, countering is easy and unfailing and your enemies are seemingly contractually obligated to wait until you're done with your counter to attack. Another problem with the melee combat is that, since the game's set in the real-world, there are only two types of enemies: actual enemies and pedestrians and you will never need to fight pedestrians. This makes the bosses underwhelming since they're only regular humans who evade almost every attack you through at them and are mostly only affected by standard counter moves. In fact, the final boss is beaten entirely with counter moves and a quick-time event.

As for the missions, they are rather varied but I never really did the optional ones, mainly because there's nothing to get out of them. The three rewards you can get out of sidequests are money, XP of both Triad and Police types and Face XP. What do you use money for? To buy cars, clothes, food and all that other stuff but cars can be easily hijacked from anywhere, clothes are unnecessary except for bonuses that are negligible and food, while very useful for its regeneration abilities, is so cheap that you could get fifty servings from a single story mission. When you level up your Police and Triad XP, you can get certain upgrades but you don't need the shooting and melee-focused upgrades they provide (that is, to say, all of them) and they don't really make anything easier. There's a side mission in which you can give statues to a karate teacher in exchange for new techniques but you don't need them because you already know all you will ever need and the fun techniques. This side mission could've been made useful to learn the flying kick or the tackle but you already know them; all these upgrades do is add an unnecessary follow-up attack to them. While entertaining, the upgrades aren't particularly useful or necessary.


Right button to counter, left button to attack. That's all you'll need.​

To get from mission to mission, you will need a vehicle. Oh boy, do I remember the vehicles... You see, I bought the Steam version of Sleeping Dogs because it was $50 and I couldn't be bothered wasting twenty minutes worth of fuel for one game. Now I'm currently wishing I was a bit looser with my money. I don't know how much different the PS3 version would be but I imagine the camera would have been a bit more cooperative. When I nudge the mouse even slightly on a bike, Wei's head turns maybe 135 degrees to the side, taking my view away from the incoming cars or street lights and turning it to the cars and street lights that would have been important to look at maybe three seconds ago. I would fix the Camera Sensitivity but I don't actually experience these problems when I'm on foot. At least, I don't think I do. Maybe it's because I'm just sprinting rather than zooming down the road at sweet Lord's bosom per hour that I don't notice it.

Something you can do while driving apart from run over everything run over-able is an Action Hijack, which is where you- surprise, surprise- hijack someone's car. On the PC, this is done via holding down Q as you get closer to your target car and then, when the game goes into bullet time and the arrow indicator on your target car is green, quickly pressing Q again. Not only is this quite fiddly, you have to be to the left of the target car to do it if you're not riding a bike. What makes this even more complicated is that cars in Hong Kong drive on the left side of the road and you can't Action Hijack if you can't open your door fully. Action Hijacking is probably the only part of the game that provides challenge if only because I'm trying to drive a car, control the camera and hijack someone else's car all at the same time.


This can be a bit tricky.​

Despite all this, I actually quite like the inclusion of Action Hijacking. It is one of the many elements that, if anyone asked me what I would classify as a good example of a cinematic game, would help me choose Sleeping Dogs. What most "cinematic" games fail to realise is that they don't work because games are about interactivity and they're trying to be movies. Showing off special effects and cinematography is perfectly fine then but players want to be a part of the action, and that's something Sleeping Dogs allows. The game manages to capture what movie set pieces feel like while still being interactive.

Another way Sleeping Dogs does this is by not really having any central gameplay modes; everything in it is just a small piece of a greater whole. The best example of this is the shooting. Yes, you can only carry one gun at a time, the get-into-cover button seems to only work about fifty percent of the time and the only three types of guns in the game are pistols, automatics and shotguns and yes, these are problems that should be fixed. However, I still like the cover-based shooting anyway because it complements the game rather than forms its foundations. Too many shooters focus entirely on the shooting and have every other interesting mechanic subdued for the sole purpose of beefing the shooting up and this game avoids that. For the most part, anyway; when the cover-based shooting does come up (which is pretty frequent later on), the game tends to be pretty focused on it and free-running and melee don't mix well with it at all. Sometimes, I'm within melee range of my target but, when holding a gun, the melee button changes to a shooter button.


It's also possible to shoot while driving.​

Despite all this, however, I can still only give Sleeping Dogs a pass. Even though it was an okay fifteen hours, it's too easy and, even with the way it mixes and matches its mechanics, it's just not the kind of game that will revitalise this industry or will be remembered; I'll probably forget about it by the end of the year. I'm not complaining about how it "borrows" elements from Batman: Arkham Asylum, Assassin's Creed and Grand Theft Auto so heavily that it could be considered outright theft because those elements work and it's possible to make a combination that works even better by removing the fat and, if nothing else, Sleeping Dogs does this. Still, while it does its best to be inventive, especially with the infiltration missions where you have to plant a bug or hack a computer with a time limit, often while the voices of the people you don't want to see you are right in the next room, and are good attempts at creating a tense atmosphere, it's just kind of stale. While it is good, all it's done has already been done before. I'm not saying it couldn't be worse; at least it doesn't have mold growing on it.

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Here are the rest of my reviews [http://porecomesisreviews.blogspot.com.au].

You know, when Yahtzee reviews a game that I'm planning to review or am in the process of reviewing, it tends to kill my motivation. Still, I pull through.
 

Goofguy

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I'm going to have to disagree with you on the upgrades. While I barely noticed the effect of the gun upgrades (probably because you rarely use them), the melee ones were well worth it. The ability to wrench your enemy's arm or kick in his knee proved very useful for controlling the flow of combat, particularly during the later rounds of the fight club missions.

My biggest problem with the game is its advertising as having a protagonist who is torn between his loyalty to the police and his gang. I was hoping it would have been a little less linear,

with the potential to choose if you want to remain in the triads or go back to being a cop at the end. Could have had interesting consequences like the police blowing your cover in the former or the triads hunting you down in the latter.

Apart of that, I thought it was a fun game. I'm not interested in ever playing it again but it was a fun enough open world game for one playthrough.
 

Porecomesis

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Goofguy said:
I'm going to have to disagree with you on the upgrades. While I barely noticed the effect of the gun upgrades (probably because you rarely use them), the melee ones were well worth it. The ability to wrench your enemy's arm or kick in his knee proved very useful for controlling the flow of combat, particularly during the later rounds of the fight club missions.

My biggest problem with the game is its advertising as having a protagonist who is torn between his loyalty to the police and his gang. I was hoping it would have been a little less linear,

with the potential to choose if you want to remain in the triads or go back to being a cop at the end. Could have had interesting consequences like the police blowing your cover in the former or the triads hunting you down in the latter.

Apart of that, I thought it was a fun game. I'm not interested in ever playing it again but it was a fun enough open world game for one playthrough.
The melee ones were fun to use but they were hardly necessary. Your counter attack will never fail no matter what you do and your basic attacks are as every bit effective as anything you can unlock.

I agree with that, too. The split XP would have made this work nicely but it's never done, which is somewhat depressing, especially since Call of Duty of all things is beginning to implement consequences for the player's actions.
 

Woodsey

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I've got to pretty much agree with you. I've seen people cumming down its throat all over the net, but I don't see why. It's incredibly derivative and almost entirely unimaginative. The original True Crime had this nice feature where the story would branch if you failed too many missions in a row. It was fairly binary, but it was an interesting idea - and it's about the only thing Dogs doesn't steal when it really should have. It's full of dead end subplots, flat characters, and bog-standard gameplay.

At no point does the game ever ask you to actually act as an undercover cop. You take missions for cops and follow the markers and Wei will plant a bug or whatever, but that's not you doing it. That's you following objective markers. As such, most of the game has no tension whatsoever.

I have my own review over [a
href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.386571-Woodsey-Weviews-vs-The-Summer-Aftermath-2012-Part-2#comment_form]here[/a] (beneath the LIMBO review).

Pendrew's American by the way, he's played by Tom Wilkinson.
 

Goofguy

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Woodsey said:
It's full of dead end subplots, flat characters, and bog-standard gameplay.
Yes I forgot this point. I don't really care about the romance subplots in such games as this but what's the point of bringing in Emma Stone as a VA if she's going to be woefully underused (and even that is an understatement)?

So you go on a few dates which have the sole purpose of showing all the collectables on your map. Unfortunately, these dates do absolutely nothing in and of themselves to advance the plot.
 

Woodsey

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Goofguy said:
Woodsey said:
It's full of dead end subplots, flat characters, and bog-standard gameplay.
Yes I forgot this point. I don't really care about the romance subplots in such games as this but what's the point of bringing in Emma Stone as a VA if she's going to be woefully underused (and even that is an understatement)?

So you go on a few dates which have the sole purpose of showing all the collectables on your map. Unfortunately, these dates do absolutely nothing in and of themselves to advance the plot.
The weirdest part of the game is undoubtedly when Wei goes fucking psycho-stalker because a girl he went out with one time is 'cheating' on him (by this point I had seen at least 2 other girls).
 

Goofguy

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Woodsey said:
Goofguy said:
Woodsey said:
It's full of dead end subplots, flat characters, and bog-standard gameplay.
Yes I forgot this point. I don't really care about the romance subplots in such games as this but what's the point of bringing in Emma Stone as a VA if she's going to be woefully underused (and even that is an understatement)?

So you go on a few dates which have the sole purpose of showing all the collectables on your map. Unfortunately, these dates do absolutely nothing in and of themselves to advance the plot.
The weirdest part of the game is undoubtedly when Wei goes fucking psycho-stalker because a girl he went out with one time is 'cheating' on him (by this point I had seen at least 2 other girls).
Hahaha yup. Anytime he is asked about relationships, he says he's not ready for one and is content with just having fun and living in the moment. However, he goes on one karaoke date with this woman and he loses his shit because she is seeing some other guy. What makes this even more odd is that the police report forwarded to his cell after said date explicitly states she sleeps around to improve her station.
 

Porecomesis

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Goofguy said:
Hahaha yup. Anytime he is asked about relationships, he says he's not ready for one and is content with just having fun and living in the moment. However, he goes on one karaoke date with this woman and he loses his shit because she is seeing some other guy. What makes this even more odd is that the police report forwarded to his cell after said date explicitly states she sleeps around to improve her station.
Wei: ... Well, that would have been nice to know about five minutes ago.

I didn't even read that report. I don't really read reports at all; I never cared enough about the characters to explore them more.
 

Goofguy

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Porecomesis said:
Wei: ... Well, that would have been nice to know about five minutes ago.

I didn't even read that report. I don't really read reports at all; I never cared enough about the characters to explore them more.
I did what any responsible cop should have done: read the reports while speeding down the highway in the opposite lanes.
 

Porecomesis

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Goofguy said:
Porecomesis said:
Wei: ... Well, that would have been nice to know about five minutes ago.

I didn't even read that report. I don't really read reports at all; I never cared enough about the characters to explore them more.
I did what any responsible cop should have done: read the reports while speeding down the highway in the opposite lanes.
Excellent work, my friend! You are one step closer to being a paragon of justice!

Although, I must confess, I am rather disappointed by your lacking number of stolen cars.
 

Goofguy

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Porecomesis said:
Goofguy said:
Porecomesis said:
Wei: ... Well, that would have been nice to know about five minutes ago.

I didn't even read that report. I don't really read reports at all; I never cared enough about the characters to explore them more.
I did what any responsible cop should have done: read the reports while speeding down the highway in the opposite lanes.
Excellent work, my friend! You are one step closer to being a paragon of justice!

Although, I must confess, I am rather disappointed by your lacking number of stolen cars.
Depending on which part of town you found yourself in, sometimes it was easier to get one of the infinite number of super cars you own in the nearby parking garage.
 

Porecomesis

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thetrellan said:
You keep saying the countermove never fails. It kind of makes it clear that you only played enough of the game to satisfy yourself that you did your job. The counter attack fails all the time, unless all you do is counter when fighting or if you limit your attacks to one or two punches at a time. But that takes waaay more patience than I personally possess.

Besides, melee is where this game shines, which you'd know had you bothered with all the missions. Once you learn all the combos and use them, the effect is pretty impressive. Yeah, you could just play the fights safe, but then you'd miss just totally trashing your foes in no time flat, or yes, dying time and again. Because it's really easy to lose track of what little health you have. Which is why you need the upgrades.

I honestly enjoyed Sleeping Dogs much more than GTA because of its emphasis on melee, as well as its atmophere, and also the fact that you actually have a reason for stealing cars other than just to get around, which GTA never did. It's your best way to make money. Although I'm sure you never realized that, since you have to steal a few before getting higher priced assignments.

It's perplexing how little you got from this game, so that you claim highjacking as its crowning moment. I found that part of the game far too easy and not really profitable enough to bother with. Do yourself a favor and get an Xbox 360 controller for pc. It's compatible with more games than other gamepads, and way more durable, so you won't have keep buying new ones. Using it will reduce your camera problems to nearly nothing. The separation of movement from camera angle is the very reason I started using a gamepad, btw. It will also keep you from wondering how console gameplay differs.
You know, whenever someone revives a tread that is over four months old, I'm always tempted to sing the chorus of Rise.

Anyway, you possess an astounding amount of arrogance. I played through the entire game, mediocre ending and all, and I still stand by the fact that the counter move cannot and will not fail to counter every attack that you use it on. Also, I learned every special move by getting every single one of those statues including that alternate counter-attack that never works on "bosses".

Please do yourself a favour and don't jump to conclusions so quickly.