Dead Space 3 (PS3): Resident Evil 6 Syndrome....

During the time when EA was running those ads "Your Mom Hates This" for Dead Space 2, I was proudly exclaiming how much I loved it by using such phrases as "I wish this game had a liquid form so I can get naked and roll around in a tub of it." I'll let you sit on that image for a few seconds.

Aside from some slight pacing issues, it basically improved on most of the the complaints I had with the original Dead Space. I have always been a huge advocate of this series feel it never got the credit it should. So naturally I was a bit hesitant when I learned Dead Space 3 takes place on icy planet and the game features 2 player co-op. Not exactly thrilled about that, but I love this series too much to not give it the benefit of the doubt.

DEAD SPACE 3:(PS3)

Two months after the events of Dead Space 2, our survivors Isaac Clark and Ellie Langford have fallen into a bit of a tumultuous schism and have broken up. The Unitologists have taken their cultish fervor to military form, going across the galaxy to activate "Markers" and speed up the Necromorph infection to cause convergence and allow them to be reborn after their grizzly murders.

We cut to Isaac looking older, tired, and heartbroken as he replays a answering machine message from Ellie. She tells him he is going to continue the fight against the Necromorphs and Unitologists without his help. After a bit of a fit throwing some pictures on the ground, his room is invaded by two soldiers of EarthGov: Carver (the co-op player) and Cap. Robert Norton (a massive douche). After a less than friendly introduction he is basically escorted at gunpoint to go after Ellie whom these soldiers lost contact with. Begrudgingly, Isaac follows them but before they even make it out the door the Unitologists attack them.

While technically a good guy, Robert is a first class douchebag.

So with this premise, I was accepting an ready to jump in to the fun that is the Dead Space universe. As soon as I take control of the game I follow my marker and meet up with the two pricks and immediately I am swamped by unitologist soldiers firing machine guns at me. But thankfully, it tells me tapping R3 will allow me to crouch, which is pretty handy considering all the cover around like chest high walls or parked cars.

Fuck. You.

It took me less than a matter of seconds of taking control of the game to be so gut wrenchingly disappointed I almost put the game down. Dead Space is a game that was hinged on creepy monsters, dark claustrophobic settings, and scary atmosphere. If I wanted to fucking duck behind cover to pop my head up and shoot at asshole human beings with guns, I could have picked up ALMOST ANY OTHER FUCKING GAME WITH A GUN IN IT. Fuck. 

Grrrrrrrr.......

In my last review I said I wasn't so backwards thinking that games couldn't update or change, but seriously, come the fuck on. Why would you take a very interesting property and try to make feel like every other 3rd person shooter on the market. I know they sell well but we're good on those, we have plenty. I want to play Dead Space.

Thankfully, this mission lasts only really long enough to serve as a tutorial and once I get away from the shitdick soldiers we get ourselves into space, and then Dead Space starts to feel like it should all over again. The controls will be pretty familiar to series regulars as they are virtually unchanged from the previous titles in this series. The only real functional changes that I was able to find is that usually R3 was the guide button to show you which way to go (a feature I love, btw) but now you have to hold it a second because as I mentioned above, it shares with crouch. On the other analog, they have also added in a dodge roll, but to be honest I never really found an enemy where it was useful.

There was another bit of a jarring shock to me is I was only able to carry two weapons this time, another throw back to the 3rd person cover based shooters they are trying to ape. This to me on one hand was kind of disappointing because I don't like it when a game tries to limit me, but on the other hand I played most of Dead Space 1 and 2 with the initial plasma cutter you start the game with. The more you would upgrade that thing, the more of a beast it would become.

The problem is, that brings us to one of Dead Space 3's newer features, fully customizable weapons. In the previous Dead Space's  you would unlock a weapon and then have to add power nodes to increase its clip, rate of fire, power, and so on. In this version you collect various parts and depending on how you add them it creates a new weapon.

This can be incredibly intimidating because the combinations are pretty plentiful. After a few minutes its easy to get frustrated and even worse its hampered by the fact you can only hold 2 guns. there really isn't even a good way to look at all of the weapons you've created to see which are stronger back to back aside from equipping them then unequipping them. It requires going through too many menus. However, the game does have a cool little workshop feature where you can load a save, tinker with your weapons then let in some monsters to see how they play out. I kinda wish I noticed this feature first because my starting cutter really wasn't cutting it (ba dum tsss).

But if you have the ability to make tons of different weapons, then how are you going to sort out ammo for all the different variations of them? Well, this gives us the unfortunate issue of only having one type of ammo. Its dropped virtually all the time, its very cheap to create, and works for everything. So a lot of the tense fear you would get from not having enough ammo is effectively dashed. Seeing 4 necromorphs baring at you and knowing you are on your last 10 shots of your cutter just added to the fear and atmosphere. Now I can pretty much just rapid fire with little fear of ever running out of ammo. 

Something else I noticed early is that necromorphs are WAY harder to kill this time around. That's a good thing too. The seasoned Dead Space player knows the score: knee shot, arm shot, stomp. In the previous two games this was pretty much all you needed to take down virtually everything in the game, so really you had no reason to upgrade your other weapons because the initial plasma cutter was such a necromorph wrecking beast.

Not my video, but thank you RetroKid91 for doing a game play video without Commentary.

Now the baddies have a lot more spring in their step, they have much more sporadic movement, and they a much harder to put down. It didn't take me long to realize I have to bulk my weapons up way more often or I wasn't going to last.  There is a handful of new types of zombie like Necromorphs as well which also add to the challenge, but generally, you know exactly what to do on each type of monster you come across.

I've said before that this series always kind of struggled when it came to the pacing. What I mean by that is never really get around to building tension by letting fear sink it. Its just start, monsters, shooting. Dead Space 3 really makes no attempt to try to pace the game for horror, because much like all the other 3rd person shooters its emulating it'd rather you start shooting at shit right away. And again, that's disappointing to me because survival horror as a genre just seems to be fading to the wayside.

Easy to kill on their own, but if they get you in groups things can get hairy.

I guess that's why the story feels like it matches this frenetic pace. There are only a handful of downtime moments in the game before shit starts to go haywire. A simple briefing on the bridge of your ship results in all the glass on the ship getting destroyed and sucking you into space (which for a spaceship, seems like a massive design oversight) and as you fling into space you have to fly past meteorites and mines to catch up to the cargo box so you can fly it to the ship you were trying to land on. This is just one example and this kinda thing happens at almost every turn. The final sequence of the game to put it simply, goes completely fucking bananas to the point where I can't figure out what the hell is happening or how we even got there.

That being said, this is the game where Issac really comes the most off as a human being. He was basically just a silent protagonist in the first game and could have been a robot for all we care. In the second game they tried to give him more of a face and dialog, but it came off as kind of generic. In this game, we have some back story, some history, some missing information to learn between games. There is some interesting and realistic emotion between the cast and their interactions (except Robert maybe), so from a story telling standpoint, this is probably the best Dead Space has done in this area.

There is one incredibly jarring flaw I've been trying not to get worked up about. As you have probably already heard before the release, one of EA's big moves "for" the player was to introduce micro transactions you find in mobile games. Their logic is if you want to get more supplies and guns and whatever, those players have the option to pay a little bit to get a few more items in the game.

Oh EA, does your generosity know no bounds? EA, you are notorious and roundly hated for your constant cash grabs. I personally hold you guys responsible for the reason I can't pick up a used game and give the online modes a try without having to pay an extra fucking 10 dollars for it, (I mean I never would, but its the principal of the fact).

But you know what? I was willing to let it slide, It didn't affect my ability to play the game at all and for the most part I didn't seem at all hampered by the fact that I was playing the single player and not the multiplayer. I also discovered the glitch that infinitely respawns some of the items you are supposed to purchase. EA said that stuff is there on purpose, and they don't intend to patch it. Alright then, good on you EA. I was able to play through the game start to finish and didn't feel handicapped, and after a while had a pretty good time with it.

But then you guys did make a patch like 3 days later, and I'll be fucking damned if that glitch wasn't the first thing to fucking go. Right after you said you weren't going to remove it. Seriously? Fuck you guys. 

I'll tell you what though, much like Resident Evil 6 before it I had a laundry list of complaints about this game when I picked it up... But then a few levels into the game they became something I just shrugged off. Not much longer after that I didn't even notice it anymore. Then I managed to beat the game and did something I very very rarely do: I kept playing.

Set the game to hard mode, modded some new weapons, went to New Game+ and played the game almost completely through again. In today's 6 hour video game world we live in, where new triple-A releases come out on a weekly bases, this almost never happens. I crank out a story and them bam, off to the next game. So despite all my bitching, I still managed to get more than 60 dollars worth of entertainment out of a game I did nothing but complain about my first time through.

So again like Resident Evil 6,  I find myself at a bit of a loss for if I recommend the game or not. So I guess the way to go about it is like this: Is Dead Space 3 fun? Yes. Does Dead Space 3 have a great story? Yes. Does the game feel like it belongs with the series? ehhhh, that's where it gets grey to me.

As I said earlier, I bought this game because I wanted to play Dead Space. This is a game that hinged its first two games on ambiance, loneliness,  fear, and excessive gore. The game manages to draw an immense fear in you because for two games it sets the pace that you are completely alone and every single dead body has the potential to rip you limb from limb if you don't see it in time. And one of the big aspects I liked about is, you couldn't headshot things. Lots of crazy different enemies and different weaknesses on a lot of them.

Dead Space 3 didn't feel like Dead Space to me, at least not the whole time. It launched me right into a segment where I have to duck behind cover, and shoot at people holding guns. That's Uncharted, that's Gears of War, that's Mass Effect 3(another example of this), that is NOT Dead Space.  Its infuriating to become invested in something, grow a passion for it, love it, advocate it, then have that love betrayed because it wants to be something else because it sells better. 

The game I love is in here somewhere. As I play through level there are a large number of segments that feel exactly like how this game should be. But then every so often I'll reach this open area with a bunch of containers strewn about that are about chest high and I groan loudly. They don't need to be there. They shouldn't be there.

But ultimately, yes Dead Space 3 is a good game and fun to play. It plays enough like it should to satisfy me as a gamer, but I can't help but feel a twinge of disappointment that they knuckled under and tried to copycat other shooters.

Dead Space, you sold out.  

Assassin's Creed III (PS3): You know what? Fuck this series.

No.

I've had enough of this. Back in May of last year I spat some serious venom about this franchise. I complained that the game continues to get away from what I felt made the game awesome.  I complained that they keep dragging out the story without letting it come to a logical closure. I complained that I keep shilling out money to continue to be disappointed. I told myself I wasn't going to do it anymore.

And as if I have no fucking sense of pattern recognition, I picked up and played it anyways....

ASSASSIN'S CREED 3: (PS3)

Assassin's Creed 3(5) picks up our never ending story after closing the tales of Ezio and Altair. The scooby gang of Desmond McDerpydoo, British Von Angstydouche, Unimportant Whatsherface, and now Desmond's grumpy dad are closing in on the location of a shrine of "Those who came before" to hopefully find a way to put an end to the impending global disaster and put a rest of this conflict between the Assassins and the Templars. But as they try to enter they find that the temple is locked away. So in order to find the key to entry Desmond has to, you guessed it, go into the Animus to relive the life of a past ancestor as his team tries to find the keys Abstergo (the templars) have already found.

You pick up as what appears to be an English Nobleman by the name of Haytham Kenway. He is attending an opera in the hopes of finding an amulet that will act as key to the Temples inner chambers. Here you take control and make your first assassination of the game. After completing his mission he takes a ship over to America to locate the temple and takes in a protege in Charles Lee. While in Boston he kills a slave trader and saves a Native American woman named Kaniehti:io. They find the temple but can't enter, and a relationship beings to blossom.

Shortly after this, the perspective jumps several years down to the line, as you take the control of the love child of Haythem and Kani, Ratonhnhake:ton. After a brief hunting mission he returns to find his village on fire, and finding the culprit to be Charles Lee. Raton is unable to save his mother as she dies in the fire.  After a meeting with the village elder and a spiritual journey with a piece of Eden, Raton goes to find the training to avenge his mother. He meets a retired assassin Achilles Davenport who reluctantly trains in how to be an assassin. After Raton is renamed Connor to travel through the cities with more ease, the hunt for Charles Lee begins.

Haythem was actually very interesting character.
That s why the big twist with him is such a punch in the gut.

Usually I stall to write my Assassin's Creed reviews usually because I get it around the holiday time and its one of the last few I get around to playing of my holiday list. This time I tried to get it out of the way early, but I have never been moved to write it. Why? Because really if you have played this Assassin's Creed then you've probably played all of them. I just remember when they announced this game at E3 and the various other gaming conferences how they were going to rebuild the franchise and make things drastically different.

I guess that means all they were really changing is how the hud looks. Because frankly to be honest that's the only thing I really noticed as different. Same style of control, same boring wait to be attacked combat, same hud. Only real changes to the game that I saw was setting, time period, and maybe a little bit of difference on some of the weapon animations. You may notice some significant changes if you played the first Assassin's Creed and then jumped to this one, but if you've followed along it feels like an expansion with no major change to it.

The one major change to the game that kind of felt out of place was the naval battles. Fairly early on you can get a ship and there are a series of missions you can do with them which lead to open sea pirate combat. At first I found this very annoying because they have you trying to navigate shallow waters without destroying your boat and its very intimidating to do. Not to mention, I'm not assassinating anyone so why should I give a shit?

I will say though, that after a few spins on this and figuring out the controls, it was actually pretty fun to learn and play. Although getting money in this game was incredibly tedious so I never got to upgrade my boat, i was still able to take the high seas in calm waves or crashing storms and fight with the best of em. If they wanted to do some kind of pirate themes offshoot game, this would be a great base to start with.

As mentioned building money is tedious. You can save people around the forest to kind of build a small community around your homestead, which then you can use their services to make supplies that you can use for trade and build money, which is then used to upgrade the homestead and your ship. The main problem is its tediously boring busy work. I basically skipped it because it didn't seem to help me progress in the story in any way.

I thought the forest was a nice change of pace for the setting somewhat. You still have a number of cities like Boston and New York for you to parkour around, but I thought using the forest to introduce some of your hunts and kills would be a refreshing change of pace to the usual Assassin's Creed cannon.

That's what I thought, anyway. Much like I complained about at the end of my Assassin's Creed: Revelations review, I feel this series is just getting further and further away from what makes the game fun. Every new edition of this game seems to be a distraction from actually assassinating people. A number of missions that I remember, You basically watch a cut scene and then guards attack. Either you kill them or break after your target when they run to kill them.

What happened to giving me a target, then just sicking me loose into the world after him? Again I go to the Hitman Series or even fuck'n Skyrim for how to do assassinations. Give me a target, give me a location, allow me to use the open sandbox environment, let me follow my mark around and see if there is a moment when they are vulnerable. Perhaps a time of day where the target is without their guard, or in a location where I can make my move and quickly escape into the confusion? Don't just drop me from clusterfuck to clusterfuck.

And really, Assassin's Creed 3 had a great opportunity to really switch up the usual formula to something better catered to that. In a very early stage in the game, Connor is shown a wall of all the targets in the story who need to be killed. Instead of making follow a linear path to kill them one at a time, I think it would have been better served to allow me to go after them as I pleased, and allow me to learn information about the rest as I do.

Or if they didn't want to break up their precious story as they had it written, allow me to go after a few contracts at a time, that way when that group of them died you can proceed with the story in a fashion like you wanted to while still providing me the freedom to actually feel like a fucking assassin. But of course, this isn't how it happened.

Shit like this is what I want to do. Not giant muskety warfare.

And really, it was really hard to feel like an assassin playing as Connor to begin with. For some strange reason despite his background, I found him to be an incredibly dislikeable character. He has the tragic past and the desire for vengeance so I have no problems with his motivations. But every single conversation he has he comes off as an aggressive dislikeable shitdick. He alienates those who try to help him constantly, responds to differences like a spoiled child, and I don't even think the guy smiles once during the course of the game. I never thought I'd ever say this in this series, but I wish I was playing as Desmond.

Thankfully, that is the other aspect of the game that I liked. There are a number of missions where you actually got to play the game as Desmond. Periodically through the game you take a break from the Animus to go on missions to find more of the keys to unlock more areas of the shrine, in this missions you actually get to do a bit of assassinry with Desmond. These are actually probably the closest missions to how I think the game should be played.

Since these parts of the game are done in the real world, and not the Animus, there is no hud for you to use either. its very subtle change that I didn't even realize at first. Some of them require a bit of stealth, sneaking, hiding, and climbing. I can't just charge in. Almost as if I have to approach things as an assassin. Crazy right?

It all comes to a head in one spectacular segment where Desmond actually takes the fight to Abstergo and you get to see some really innovative and stylish kills that Desmond gets to do. My problem is that they didn't last long enough. Now I know what you're thinking, "If they aren't letting you do that many as Desmond, that means they are setting it up for the next game."

Unfortunately, that isn't the case and it brings up the biggest problem I have with the game. This is something I complained about in the Assassin's Creed: Revelation review, and I'm gonna do it again here: The game has no fucking ending.  I don't mean in the shitty "Go buy Assassin's Creed 3.5" way of things.

I'm gonna be a massive prick here and spoil the ending, but Ubisoft basically spent 5 game teaching me that the experience Desmond gets in the animus will make him an assassin.  For a few missions I get to experience this effect in blissful violence. As the game comes to a close the story gets muddled even further and BAM, Desmond is killed off.  They literally tease that the world can end one of two ways, and they just wipe out the main character without rhyme or reason.

They give some very lack luster epilogue while the credits roll before dropping you back in Connor's time to clean up any side missions you have as well as a bonus mission. Don't care, Didn't do it. Fuck this game. I had to sit through this soft science premise for 5 games, all the while thinking that I was training this character to be some elite class of assassin. Before I even get a chance to wet my pallet with this character, he is abruptly taken away from me with incredibly minimal explanation.

I guess I could say this opens up a new path for the story take, with a much more modern sci-fi-ish bent. But the problem is, I don't fucking care anymore. You can't keep taking customer base for granted. People want fucking closure, and just wiping out the main character you've been building for 5 games was not the way to do it. So now we have this new all powerful threat coming threat, and with the way the game ended there is no new hero to take up the fight.

So you know what Assassin's Creed? Fuck you. I'm done. Each release I see more and more of the game I love get squeezed out of this property for arbitrary side bullshit, unintuitive samey combat, tortuously poor story telling, and an overall lack of direction for the series as a whole. I'm not doing it anymore. I've sat back and watched this game get stellar reviews heralding its great story telling and how it accomplishes so much as a franchise that it deserves it praise.

I wholeheartedly disagree. I am not a backwards thinking neanderthal that thinks games can't change, but there is certainly a point something has lost its direction, and Assassin's Creed 3 has definitely fallen into the latter with me. Change the time, change the setting, change the characters, yet at the same time is hasn't changed anything. Same old Assassin's Creed. Feels like all the games that came before it and I'm still no closer to seeing the story end. You want to play Assassin's Creed, go play the 2nd one then quit.

Part of the game I love is in here, but it keeps getting pushed aside for new crap I can barely see it anymore. Until they publicly state that "This is the last Assassin's Creed game" I'm not buying another. 

Sleeping Dogs (PS3): Aggressively Average

When I went to PAX East last year, I got to try a demo in the Square Enix booth for a title called Sleeping Dogs. Didn't know what it was, it just had a short line and wanted to try it. In this demo I got to chase down a guy with information with some entertaining quick time event parkour, and then fight sequence where I beat the crap out of some thugs with some nifty environment kills. It was pretty entertaining.

What I didn't know, is that this is actually the new incarnation of the True Crime series that Square Enix picked up. For legal reasons they couldn't use the actual name but its the same franchise. I haven't played either of them so I didn't know what to expect, but my experience with the Yakuza series lead me to think that this is worth the shot. I received it over the Xmas holiday so now and finally got the opportunity to sit down with it at length.

SLEEPING DOGS:(PS3)

The story opens up on the docks of Victoria Harbor in Hong Kong. Wei Shen is trying to make a trying to make a drug deal before it gets busted up by the cops. In a quick parkour sequence you are thrust right into the action of trying to escape the pursuing police. Wei Shen's escape is all for naught however, as he is cornered by swat units and arrested. While waiting in jail, he meets up with old friend Jackie Ma. Jackie is a bit of a slacker and just an underling, but he does have a connection to Winstion Chu, a Sun on Yee red pole (general) and offers to help Wei Shen get into the gang when they get out.

Wei Shen is removed from the cell to be interrogated, but when the camera goes off it is relieved that he is actually an undercover officer with a bit of a sorted past. While he isn't an ideal candidate Wei Shen is the police's best chance to get somebody into the Triad. So despite that Wei Shen is perhaps a bit unstable, the police go forwards with Wei Shen's cover still in tact as he tries to climb his way up the ranks of the Triad.

Jackie can be a bit of a wiener, but its hard to the hate the guy. 

As I had mentioned, I played this game at PAX East. I knew very little going in, and aside from the combat I really had no idea what to expect. What I didn't expect was to see that this game is a sandbox title in the same fashion as Grand Theft Auto. Perhaps from the bit of the chapter I played I was expecting it to be more like Yakuza 4 was and have most of the game play on foot. That said, there were a number of vehicle sections and most of them handled well enough. Didn't feel as realistic as Grand Theft's are or as arcadey as say Saints Row or Burnout but they were at least functional.

I will give it the nod as one of Sleeping Dogs better features is the ability to carjack from other cars or bikes. There are a few missions and situations where you can dive off your cars hood onto the targets car, start throwing fists into their window before popping the door and flinging them out, so you can slide in and take  over their ride. I gotta admit, if that's something True Crime always did in their games I'm kinda upset I never noticed. That was fun as hell to do. 

Seriously, How can you be bored when you're hanging off a speeding car's roof?

But unlike the sandbox games its aping after,  Sleeping Dogs comes up kind of lacking in the distraction department. Many of the mini games appear during the course of missions and they are things you have to do to complete them, which doesn't really make them "mini games" to me. A mini game is a nifty little side game thrown in to be a distraction, something to goof around in. But the lock picking, code breaking, line hacking, and safe cracking are all done as part of missions. The only real side things to do are cockfighting (no homo), and karaoke.

GTA and Yakuza had enough mini games on each disc that they could be stripped out and sold as shovel ware on the wii for 20 bucks. Darts, Pool, arcade games, pachinko, casino games, bowling, baseball, are just some of the distractions for those two franchises. Even something like prostitution, which is a concept that is discussed quite a bit in Sleeping Dogs, never really comes up as an option to partake in. You can go to massage parlors, but that's about it. GTA had hookers running around to restore health, Yakuza had the hostess clubs to go on dates, Saints Row had the pimp missions. All of these had interesting distractions for the player. Sleeping Dogs comes up lacking in this department.

Something about all the graphics seem pretty unpolished to me too. Wei Shen looks well enough but virtually every other character just looks rough around the edges. The female characters were particularly bad. Its probably not a good sign when the one American woman in the game looks more Chinese than the actual Chinese women. Perhaps I'm nit picking, but going back to Yakuza 4, I don't think I've ever seen character models look more naturally human. But its not even that, its like there's a distinct like of pixelation around the edges of each of the characters, and they look even worse on close up shots on the characters faces.

"Dating" usually consists of one side mission.

Another thing that kinda threw me is the amount of English used in the game. I suppose it makes sense since this game is being sold and marketed to an American audience, but it just doesn't feel right to see very Chinese characters not speaking Cantonese. Many of the older, and probably more stereotypical characters will speak it with subtitles, and some of the characters do that kinda weeabo thing where they splice in like 2 or 3 Cantonese words in an English sentence.

I guess both languages are the officially accepted languages of Hong Kong, but it doesn't mesh well for me. Wei Shen has a back story of growing up in America for a number of years so I was able to buy into his very American accent. But say one of the side characters like Winston Chu? It just didn't feel or look right. I feel sticking to one or the other would have been better served. The constant switching of Cantonese to Ingrish made me feel slightly racist for giggling at it. Part of me thinks this was done on purpose to give me white guilt.

The radio stations felt kinda lacking too, but really I go off them on two points: How good is the talk radio, and how good is the metal station. As far as I could tell with it, there wasn't much in the way of talk radio. Certainly not the hilarious radio shows Lazlow will give you with GTA. But the metal station, in this case "Roadrunner Records" gave me Devildriver, Opeth, Fear Factory, and Killswitch Engage. That's all shit I listen to so music for the most part gets a pass.

I am belaboring too many of the negatives here, there was one big saving grace to the game and its what made me enjoy the demo in the first place and that is the visceral combat. It can best be described as a more violent version of the Batman: Arkham Asylum engine. Attack button you can hold for heavy and tap for light, counter, grab and dodge. Enemies are telegraphed with a mark when they go to strike and the combat is fast paced and fun to play, but what makes it excel is the violent environmental kills you can use when you grab an enemy.

All the hand to hand has just the right amount of weight to make shots look like they hurt.

One of the first things I did after pounding on a group, was grab a guy and spike his head into the spinning fan of an air conditioning unit. Watching his body flail to pull himself out as blood and chunks of skull flew out was pretty hard to watch, but fucking awesome. There are a whole myriad of attacks like this, and they are fun to use but ultimately not the best way to dispatch enemies.

There is also some cover based shooting that is introduced midway through the game, which brings back the True Crime "slow-mo-dive-through-the-air-bullet-time" sequences. To be completely honest I didn't really use this all that much because it was way more fun to run into a crowd and beat the snot out of them with my fists.

Sad to say, this isn't even the most violent thing in the game. 

Unlike Wet the bullet time feature actually works.

To wrap up what is getting to be a longer review than I intended I'll say this: without the fun combat, this game would have nothing. I don't like the use the term Grand Theft Auto Clone because I think its unfair to games in the sandbox genre. But this game really feels like its trying to ape a much more superior title with half the resources that makes it great.  Sleeping Dogs did not do well on a commercial scale and Square Enix is still trying to recover from the hit they took on it.

But that being said, despite all the complaints I had with the game I had fun with it. The story line is pretty good and it held my interest, It definitely had some flashes of brilliance in a lot of the chase missions both on foot and in vehicle, and the hand to hand combat is fluid and fun to play. I think with some more polish and some additional features this really could have been something. Perhaps if they divvied up with how you played the game if you decided to go Pro-Cop or Pro-Triad. That would have opened the door for some interesting story moves. 

Sleeping Dogs is already down to 50 new and 40 used, and I can't imagine it will be long before the price drops again. The combat was entertaining enough to give me a few weeks of play out of it so I could recommend it if you have the extra money to spend, but you would be well within reason to wait for the game to drop in price again. The way Squenix is complaining about it I can't imagine that would be too long.

There is one big thing I learned in this game though: Be afraid of the Triads. They are fucking crazy.