Review: Sleeping Dogs

Sleeping Dogs is a sandbox shooter for the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. It was developed by United Front Games and Square-Enix London.

Wei Shen walking around downtown Hong Kong.

With the inadvertent help of childhood friend Jackie Ma, undercover cop Wei Shen has infiltrated the Triad gang the Sun On Yee. Under the eye of his boss Pendrew and his handler Raymond, Wei needs to maintain his cover while trying to find a way to take down the gang. It is going to be difficult for Wei though, with half the gang filled with dangerous psychopaths and the other half filled with old friends, all suspecting that he is a cop.

Sleeping Dogs is made up of several missions, where Wei does all Sun On Yee’s work for them. Said work involves driving to places, chasing after people, fighting people, shooting people while driving, and avoiding the police, with the occasional planting of hidden bugs.

You can buy food and drinks on the street which give you temporary health boosts.

What is interesting about missions is that every mission has three Triad points and three police points to collect. If you collect enough points you unlock new fighting abilities for Wei, some of which are actually useful. You get the Triad points for pulling off fancy attacks and shooting moves when fighting. But with the police points, you start off with three points and lose them by doing things like running over people and crashing into cars. It is not worth it to get all three points though, which is more difficult than fun. Thankfully you only need two points most of the time.

There are also side missions which Wei can complete for generic face points, which also unlock abilities. The side missions are more driving and fighting, and sometimes racing.

Wei can also find lock boxes filled with money, which you can buy new clothes and cars with.

The game has two kinds of fights: melee and guns. There is a definite favoring of the melee fights over the gun fights, which is evident by the way the game takes away any gun you find as soon as it can so you have to fight with your fists. You got a basic punch button which you can mash to chain stronger attacks, a grapple, and a counter. Completing missions with many Triad points unlock more painful attacks, as does finding statues that you can give to Wei’s sensei.

The combat is dull and frustrating. Enemies can block everything whenever they want so you are stuck until they lower their guard or attack you. You can grab someone, which breaks through blocking, but that takes a while and does not do much damage unless you use an environment attack, which is an attack where Wei smashes the thug against something and can only be done once per environmental object. If the enemies are fat or holding a weapon Wei cannot grab them at all for some stupid reason. You can counter an enemy when the enemy turns red, but a lot of the time the game does not respond when you press the counter button. Eventually, if you unlock enough abilities, Wei becomes strong enough that fights go a bit quicker. This makes fight tolerable, but not fun.

There is also a face meter that fills up when you fight. I could not tell what it does when it fills up, it might have made Wei stronger, but I was not sure. It might have also made his attacks break blocks, but if it did break blocks, it did not do it enough times to be noticeable. The only thing it did do was make enemies flinch for a second.

Shooting people is a bit more enjoyable. Pressing a button gets Wei to cover, where you can peer out from behind cover and aim, or blindfire. You get more Triad points for headshots or blowing up gang members. You can also leap over cover, which sends the game into slow-mo mode for a second. Gunfights are okay, it is quick and satisfying to pick off gang members, and trying to get a higher Triad score adds a little bit to the challenge.

Gun fights in cars are exciting as well, though being able to shoot tires make them a  bit easy.

The story is a mess. Wei Shen and his bosses have no greater plan than infiltrate the Sun On Yee and take it down from the inside, which is vague and grandiose. It is obvious from the beginning that the story is setting up an internal conflict in Wei between his loyalty to the police and the Sun On Yee, what with his superiors acting like assholes all the time and the gang acting like a surrogate family that is just full of the best people ever, even though they deal in extortion and other thuggery, and employ the guys who serve as the games antagonists.

Wei is inconsistently written, sometimes he is okay with committing crimes and abusing his police powers, even when it would not help his cover, and other times he is not. It is not portrayed as him getting use to it; he is cool with doing awful things right from the start, except when he is not.

Wei talks to characters like he knows them, without any introduction to the audience, and other characters are forgotten by the story. The only character I liked was Jackie Ma, who is funny and actually has a story arc covering his interest in becoming a gangster.

There is no main story , Wei just does jobs for the Sun On Yee, argues with his police handlers, and climbs the ranks whenever someone conveniently dies, until the game is over.

Sleeping Dogs is not the worst sandbox game ever made, but it does nothing special. The only thing it tries to do differently is the melee fighting, and that is an unpleasant experience. The game is okay, but you will not miss anything if you pass on this one.