Doing favors for pedestrians or busting drug-dealers kept us constantly engaged, making it difficult to ever put down the controller.īut while small problems with controls and occasional glitches won't hold you back, you might become frustrated by the fact that Sleeping Dogs never fully embraces how fun Sleeping Dogs is to play. Thankfully, the game provides bountiful opportunities to use these skills, both in the game’s lengthy campaign-which takes some 15 hours to complete-and the plentiful side missions, which can easily tack on another 10.
Every single action is so entertaining that we’d go looking for trouble just as an excuse to use our fun melee takedowns, awesome gunplay, and fantastic driving skills. When all of these elements mix together (with a dash of parkour thrown in for good measure), Sleeping Dogs rises to the top, surpassing nearly every other sandbox-style game. It’s extremely amusing to jump from car to car, making the driving segments of the game much more enjoyable than those found in other open-world games. Besides being able to drift around corners and shoot out enemies’ tires (causing them to flip through the air and explode, obviously), Wei can also smash into enemy vehicles to disable them, or even leap from one car to another, carjacking them while they’re speeding down the highway. Better yet, using melee on an enemy while holding a weapon triggers unique attacks, like Shen running up his foe’s chest and then kicking off in slow motion for an awesome action-movie attack.Īnd, of course, there’s driving, which is much smoother than it is in most others in the genre.
It’s always fast, it’s always rewarding, and it’s always fun, pulling from the best in the genre. The combat features a cover system and slow-motion that triggers whenever you leap over an object in the environment, allowing you to clear rooms without an issue. Sleeping Dogs gunplay is robust, even if it is deemphasized in favor of fists (or knives, or tire-irons, or fish). This flexibility makes for highly entertaining melee battles, and no matter how many times you're thrown into a room with a dozen enemies to defeat you'll always enjoy your time doing it. What’s more, grappling enemies opens up additional options, allowing Wei to drag his enemies over to objects for environmental kills, or to just throw them off ledges or into enemies. He’s not an amoral killer-he’s a cop thrown into the middle of something big, and that stress gets to him quickly, creating a well-developed, likable character. Shen has understandable motives that extend far beyond simply trying to make a bunch of money. This small detail makes a big difference, both in terms of story and gameplay.
That said, if you've never played Sleeping Dogs, this is undoubtedly the version to get. However, it's aged in two years, especially in this post-GTA5 world, so is probably not worth buying again if you already have it, although Steam owners get a 50% discount if they already own the game. The draw here is value, not flash, because bundled with the game are 24 DLC expansions including The Zodiac Tournament, Nightmare in North Point, and Year of the Snake, along with a glut of costumes that let you dress as Jackie Chan’s drunken master or don a barcode and bald head like Agent 47. Sleeping Dogs already looks lovely, so the remaster’s high-density traffic and enhanced resolution don’t advance things massively.