Sleeping Dogs Review (PS3) – 7GPPs

Sloth

14 years ago

Straight to the Point : Great game, just not good enough for the £45 price tag

Go to the Video Games reviews section of this page and before this review got published there was only one reviewer – our resident site admin Matt, and as the forums will proclaim, he’s an X-Boxer, so yours truly has decided that there needs to be some PS3 reviews up in this place, and where better to start than my holding game till Borderlands 2 hits; Sleeping Dogs?

You can read this anywhere on this here interwebs but for those who haven’t read any news or reviews on this game before, It started life as True Crime: Hong Kong and was practically built before Activision decided that it was costing too much to create and threw it in the bin. luckily for us Square Enix opted to throw enough money to get the game released but didn’t want to take up the True Crime series name and instead gave it the new name of Sleeping Dogs.

I got asked a while back what it was like and replied that it was Grand Theft Auto in Hong Kong, with more Pork Buns and less Cousins wanting to go bowling. Having given it sometime now I don’t think I did the game justice, as it is much, much more than that.

The first thing you’ll notice is that it is graphically amazing, and looks like the Hong Kong many of us have probably seen on screen and a few in person. Look out over the ocean at the sunrise or sunset and it’s probably an even better view than if you actually travelled there and did it yourself, in that thing called real life.

The Story

You take the role of Wei Shen, a cop who has been tasked with infiltrating the Sun On Yee, a triad organisation that HKPD have been trying to bring down. Anyone who’s familiar with Hong Kong Cinema will instantly feel right at home with the tale that ensues of murder, deceit, high speed car chases, gun fights and kung fu.

The Game itself

When you get to the crux of the game it is always going to draw comparisons to Grand Theft Auto, what with it being a sand-box game where you steal cars; do varied missions, which include things such as: ‘Go Kill Him’, ‘Take this to there’, ‘Go destroy this’ and ‘Steal this and get away from the cops’, and the side missions where you have several support characters who take you away from the main story. All of which are very familiar, but the comparisons whilst understood, is an unfair one, as the gameplay in Sleeping Dogs feels very different indeed.

Essentially, the game Is a lot easier to play. I’ve literally done every mission now in less than 3 weeks of buying it and this is from someone who hardly ever finishes games, in fact other than the Arkham and Lego series’ I can’t recall another PS3 game where I’ve got to the end of the story, let alone 100%’d it.

The easiness of playing is mostly down to the controls/npc characters, get into a chase with the police and it never escalates. Eventually you will be able to outrun them, even if you’ve got one of the slower cars, as they just can’t navigate the more narrow Hong Kong streets; anyone who’s ever played a Saints Row or a GTA will be more than at home on them. Then there’s the fight mechanism’s, a quick press of a button and most of the time you’ll have your opponent in a hold where you can easily beat the snot out of him, if you can’t get a hold of him, then all you need to do is wait for him to turn red and then very similar to the Arkham Asylum/City fight system, 1 button will start a counter attack.

Although you only really need 2 moves while fighting, it’s a lot more fun to try and mix your attacks up. Train Wei up a bit and you can break your opponents leg ,making any enemies in close proximity wince, which leaves them a perfect target to do exactly the same thing to them! Then there’s the fact that most fights are in an interactive environment, you can drag your opponents to a payphone and beat them unconscious with the receiver; you can throw them onto a case of frozen sword-fish, whose noses will stab and kill them; or you can go for the old favourite of throwing them into a fuse box and watching them be electrocuted. All of this adds variation to the combat system and mean you don’t have to do the same attacks all the time.Note, that if you’re ever a bit unsure before going into a fight there are plenty of food vendors around the city, prepared to sell you Pork Buns, Chicken on a Stick, Noodles or a variety of other goodies that will give you temporary boosts of your fighting abilities.

Another thing that sets SD aside from GTA is that there are sections where you need to do a bit of free-running in a parkour style, including sliding over boxes, scaling up walls and vaulting over obstacles. If you miss time your button press you’ll still do the parkour action but sloppily and if it’s a timed mission you ‘may’ fail. Saying this even if you do mess up, nine times out of ten, you don’t fail the mission, you just do it a bit slower and there’s no detrimental effect to the story; it just continues on.With the above in mind though, SD is definitely not a bad game at all, in fact I’d say it’s very, very good one. I guess it’s a fine line between making your game too easy or too hard, look at the Devil May Cry games, ( more than 1 joypad was broken playing those), or Duke Nukem Forever, one of the worst games I’ve ever played, simply because it was just too easy to play; sleeping Dogs seems to have found the line. Yes it is on the easy side, but not so much that you don’t want to play it. I mean when I was allowed the TV (for some reason my Vita didn’t like remote playing Sleeping Dogs), the game was constantly on and even after I’d finished the main story, I still came back to sweep up the remaining achievements; it was that engrossing.I think where the game excels itself most though is the storyline. There was a point in it that actually had an Aeris moment and had to pause and ask what in the blue hell I’d just witnessed?! Not as dramatic of course, but nothings ever beats Final Fantasy 7 in getting me shouting at the TV because of what I just saw. There are some characters that just flit in and out of Wei’s life, in particular the characters that Wei ‘dates’, like a stereotypical gaming male character, who goes on one date, has his way, gets an upgrade to his game, and leaves them, (This does mean that Emma Stone’s character is hardly featured, and more Emma Stone is always good) but other than that gripe, it keeps you going and has that ‘just 5 more minutes’ factor that is a must in gaming.

Overall, I’d say Sleeping Dogs is well worth picking up, whilst you’re not going to get a hard challenge to play, you’re going to get a fun one; hell this is a game that has an achievement for killing an opponent with a fish, that alone would have got it a decent score straight away.

Its maybe not £45 good, which is sadly what I paid, but I’d foresee it going down in price in the near future and there’ll probably be a few pre-owned flying about soon, maybe for a little bit less.
Definitely worth a play.

7/10