Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition Reviews

Sleeping Dogs is a weird one for me--objectively, I'm capable of looking at the game and saying, "yeah, that's a good game." The story and characters are compelling, controls are nice and tight, the soundscape is excellent, and graphics are actually better than a few games that were released in the couple of years following this one. The reason I found myself struggling to want to play the game comes down to content, which I'll roll into story for this review.

Starting with controls, moving Wei Shen around Hong Kong and defeating enemy attackers is probably easier with Sleeping Dogs than any other game I've played released in the 2011-2014 timeframe so far. Press the punch button. Wei throws a punch. Aiming is an easier time than even an FPS from the era. Driving can be a little hairy at times, but it's actually pretty simple with a little practice. The only issue I encountered is unique to my controller--I play with a DualShock 4, and the game was built for an Xbox 360 controller. Glyphs don't translate things like A is now X, and Y is now Triangle. That's to be expected with games older than circa 2018, so I don't even ding for it anymore. Karaoke was an interesting departure from other franchises with the minigame--you have a slider instead of a series of button presses--and it was actually a little refreshing. (10/10)

Graphics are great. Watching Wei Shen move around Hong Kong, and the level of love and care the artists put into it was amazing. I can change his clothes, recognize individual tattoos, and even see which Traids have gold teeth versus which Triads are not rocking a grille. Clothing is detailed down to being rumpled and dirty, and if I didn't know better, I'd suspect this was a game produced in a later timeframe than it was. Things ran pretty smoothly on my Sapphire RX 470 GPU; it had more than enough horsepower to give me the level of detail that blew me away (something I'm not used to with an older, mid-range-at-best GPU). Even rain has a level of detail I've come to expect in a later era of gaming. Menu design is slick and thematic, and I looked forward to linking the game to my HD TV via Steam Link. (10/10)

This soundscape absolutely slaps. I had the same sense of cool that I got the first time I played a GTA game and was able to switch radio stations, and the variety of stations was outstanding. I'm not really a fan of traditional Chinese music, but given the setting, I'd cruise around playing that station or Roadrunner most often. The karaoke songs had an interesting and varied selection of older tunes in English, and that coupled with the unique presentation of karaoke made me want to play through them all pretty quickly. Sound effects were perfect--between the rev of engines, the thud of a tire iron hitting someone's skull, the beeps of my phone as I hacked a computer and the smash of a car as I plowed down a parking meter, it doesn't get much better than this. But wait, there's more! The voice acting was phenomenal, and cutscenes felt like an interesting mobster movie based around Triads rather than the Italian mob movies that are more common here in the US. Each character was realized in a perfect, compelling way as the actors conveyed emotion, orders and a sense of undercover danger. (10/10)

So far, I've given the game a perfect score. You may be asking yourself why I had trouble staying invested in the game, as I mentioned in the beginning of the review. Honestly, it wasn't difficult at first. I engaged with (most of) the main story first. As I took a break to not get too far ahead, I started knocking out some of the other things in the games. My goal was to complete the achievements before writing this review; at this time, I have not started the DLCs. Discussing this game in a Discord server that just completed a group play through, someone described it as "a vast and shallow ocean." They went on to explain that the story was too short and the grind was annoying. I’m hovering around 55 hours of play time with DLC not started, and I agree with that assessment. Maybe a longer campaign and less filler would’ve made it more compelling. I think the campaign is what I enjoyed the most, but it only consumed about 15 hours of my total time invested. In my opinion, the martial arts clubs could’ve been dropped completely, the races and cop jobs could’ve been fewer in number and the campaign should’ve explored more of Hong Kong. I also wouldn’t have minded an extra case file; those were kind of neat. Maybe the DLC will fix these issues for me, but I tend to doubt it. I generally wait until I've completed DLC to write these reviews, but I'm not sure I'm going to complete it in this case. The short version of this is Sleeping Dogs is technically a good game that checks off many boxes for me, but it suffers from too little focus on the main campaign and too much emphasis on the grind. Again--I think it’s objectively a good game, but it definitely suffers from content problems that plague many other games that get stuck in development hell. It certainly sucks the fun out of a 100% run for a game that could've been incredible. (4/10)

If a sequel is ever released, I will play it. That said, I'd wait on any sequel to go on sale before purchase. Repurposing a True Crime game wasn't a bad idea, but the devhell that came from it seriously harmed the final product more than scrapping it and starting on a unique product would've. Overall, it's not engaging enough to hold the interest of an achievement hunter or someone who absolutely wants to get the bang for their buck, but it's great if you're a gamer who beats the campaign and moves on. Unfortunately for this review, I'm the former. (6/10)