This sleeping dog is one you'll find yourself wanting to wake.
An oil rigger has one of the most dangerous jobs around. If he says that to Wei Sheng, he'll laugh in his face and toss him a comfort blanket. Wei is an undercover cop working for the Hong Kong Police Department, and his assignment is to infiltrate the Sun On Yee, a faction of the one of the deadliest criminal organizations of the world: the Triads. The game starts with Wei trying to get initiated into the family, but as circumstances continue to unfold, he finds himself going in much deeper than he ever imagined. Constantly reminded of his duties as a police officer, he also finds himself compelled to honor a sacred code of loyalty. Can Wei manage to do his job while keeping his cover - and himself - safe?
As far as sandbox games go, Sleeping Dogs is weak in several areas. The driving may not be as tight as Grand Theft Auto IV, and it may not have the mission variety of a Saint's Row game. What it does extremely well is hand to hand combat. In fact, no other sandbox game does fighting that impresses this much. The fighting system plays out similarly to the Batman Arkham games, where it's one button to attack, one button to counter and one button to grapple. The kung fu action is very fluid and connects rather well, but Sleeping Dogs ups the ante.
You can use the environment to your advantage to instantly take out your enemies. You can fling them into giant fish tanks and watch as a flood of water and flopping fish wash over the floor, comically dispose of them in dumpsters, launch them over railings, shove their heads into spinning fan blades, table saws, stoves, impale them on racks of swordfish heads and many other brutalizing hazards. Add arm and leg breaking into the mix and the combat of Sleeping Dogs is sadistically satisfying.
You can't keep fighting with just your fists, however, and that's when you need to pick up a gun. The gunplay is one of those areas where it's not as strong as its competition, because it does lack a large arsenal of weapons to use and also is missing a weapon vendor option. Whether you get arrested, die, or finish a mission, you lose your current weapon and begin again bare-fisted. There's also no way to pick up more than one weapon at a time, so you really have to think carefully about what gun you want to bring into the next fire fight.
Shooting may be a bit of a chore since Wei does not snap to targets when he he pokes around cover to take off a shot or two. To compensate, he can leap over cover and enter slow motion to give himself an advantage when seeking new cover. It's just a shame that you can't buy weapons whenever you want to unleash havoc at will but when you remind yourself that you're still a cop, it does make a bit of sense.
Sometimes your enemy chooses flight over fight and then it's off on one of many foot chases. This is another facet of the game that Sleeping Dogs does well. The free running system isn't complex in the slightest and requires just a press of the X button at the right moment. You'll see Wei vaulting tables and sliding across food counters with ease, climbing scaffolding like a cat, leaping across gaps high above the streets below and even plummeting several stories as his prey crashes through a roof below him. These sequences are pretty thrilling and is a good reminder that you need to be in fit physical condition should you ever want to be a cop.
As for the driving, you'll instantly notice that the physics are uncharacteristic of what cars handle like in the real world, most notably motorcycles. You might as well be in a car when you're on a motorcycle, because you glance off objects like you were bumping into piles of pillows. You pretty much have to make it a concentrated effort to crash and launch yourself off your bike and when you do, there's a good chance the bike will still be standing on its own two wheels, unassisted with a kickstand. The game also inexplicably does not tell you what kind of vehicle you've just gotten into, which has been a staple of the genre for close to a decade. The assortment of cars is also a bit shy in comparison to other games, but the cars in Sleeping Dogs are pretty well designed with obvious influences of real life cars.
Sleeping Dogs does have a couple of aces up its sleeve when it comes to the driving, though. The first is Action Hijacking. When you're moving, you can hold X to make Wei lean out of his vehicle (or in the case of a motorcycle, stand on top of it) and when you get close enough to the back of another moving car, a white arrow will appear. When it turns green, Wei can then leap to that vehicle and take control. No more will you have to cut off and corner a car that you want. You can now just carjack it on the fly; it's a terrific system.
There will also be times where Wei will be shooting at enemies in cars of their own, and Wei can also slow down time to shoot at the drivers or at their tires. It's cool to blow out tires, but the vehicles' reactions to these blowouts are very unrealistic. They catapult and somersault themselves without doing any kind of swerving or crashing into walls or traffic first. It's just another visual disconnect. What will be appreciated is how Wei will have unlimited ammo at his disposal during these cutscenes, because there is nothing more frustrating than running out of ammo when in a car.
Sleeping Dogs has a serious story to tell, and as such it takes itself rather seriously. It does try to lighten the mood up with random side missions, but there simply isn't enough mission variety to keep you distracted when you don't feel like progressing through the main story line. There's a lot of grunt work such as collecting protection money and stealing cars, but that becomes rather boring if you do it for too long. Wei meets a few girls, but without a proper selection of venues, these dates hold no real special meaning. In fact, the only thing you really do on a date is sing at a karaoke bar. They can be a bit entertaining, but the karaoke mechanic is so dull, you'll dread doing it again after the third song.
Sleeping Dogs is also prone to the same thing that afflicts just about any other sandbox game, and that's glitches. One irritating glitch is an unreliable GPS system. Although it's nice that the game flashes up big giant arrows when you need to make a turn, it tends to turn itself off at times, requiring you to reset your way point. NPCs offering up quests are prone to getting run over by sporadic traffic behavior, having you drive away for a few blocks in order to respawn the mission. You might get stuck practicing the same move in the dojo over and over again, forcing you to quit and retry before you learn the move. Other glitches will pop up that won't load the next marker during a mission, while some are weird visual oddities such as warped distortions of clothing during cutscenes. None of these glitches are that problematic, but they are frequent enough to be noticeable.
You won't be overly impressed with the graphics of Sleeping Dogs on a technical scale, as the whole of Hong Kong just doesn't look all that good. It's when you look at certain specifics that you begin to appreciate the game's take on realism. The cars themselves are rendered very well with shiny paint jobs and smooth lines that wrap around their frames like silk garments. The damage models could have used some more work, though, as hoods don't even fly off at high speeds once they've popped open. The water is pretty decent for a sandbox game, and the artistic direction in general is fantastic with neon hues from shop signs, lamps strung across streets and food markets tucked away in every alley. The graphics are best when they're depicting the main characters. They are modeled very realistically, whereas many sandbox characters tend to render their characters a bit cartoonishly, and they all animate very well during those cutscenes. Unfortunately, not every animation in the game is up to snuff, with the worst offender being Wei's jerky animations when steering a boat.
The real test of any sandbox game's atmosphere is that of its audio, and this is a department that Sleeping Dogs nails beautifully. Although its radio stations may not be as deeply varied as the Grand Theft Autos and Saints Rows, the music it does contain is excellent. The hip hop tracks are mostly from underground artists which gives the game a grittier feel, and it also contains a few Chinese rappers along with other Chinese musical groups to reinforce authenticity. The sound effects are absolutely fantastic from the bone-breaking moves Wei unleashes to terrorizing reports from some heavy duty machine guns to thundering explosions. Sleeping Dogs also has outstanding voice acting with Emma Stone, Lucy Lui and James Hong as some of the more famous names. There's also a lot of dialogue spoken in Cantonese, which really makes you feel like you're in the heart of Hong Kong.
Sleeping Dogs is an all around solid game, but it makes the mistake of relying too heavily on a couple of strong mechanics while doing the bare minimum in most other areas. Fantastic combat has you actively looking for a good fight, and Action Hijacking makes you feel like a real super cop, but you just wish there was more to do. If you're looking for a deep, involving sandbox game that will you keep you addicted for weeks, you're not going to find it here. With not much to offer on the side, the game's story arc can be completed rather quickly, but oh what a great arc it is!