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.