Sleeping Dogs was a game I bought in Steam's 2013 Autumn Sales, after being curious about this game for a long time and being aware that looking up YouTube footage might have spoiled the story for me, this sale was a good opportunity for me to just gamble on this one.

And it was jackpot for me. Having played Just Cause 2, GTA 1 to 4, Saints Row 3, L.A. Noire and countless other free roaming games, I was completely overwhelmed by how convincing Hong Kong was portrayed in Sleeping Dogs. Hong Kong, which in this review refers to the map in Sleeping Dogs, is a graphically pleasing platform that carries the player through a gritty storyline revolving around Chinese gangsters. Even though the city is small compared to most of the aforementioned free roaming city games, there is a healthy amount of detail put in every square foot of Hong Kong, making the city feel as big as it would have felt in real life. The city dynamics are downright convincing, you will encounter a large amount of variation among the residents, each with their own reason for being on the street. This, and the amounts of interaction provided for the player, is something that at the time of writing is not appreciated enough in the industry.

Sleeping Dogs features oriental themed music to reinforce that atmosphere. The genre of the background music as well as the radio stations vary from hip-hop to classic, all with Chinese roots. Luckily, a great majority of the used vocabulary is English, although you may encounter a Chinese swearword here and there. This is translated in the subtitles and may seem a bit forced, if not out of place. Personally I find it understandable considering a full English or Chinese transcript would've alienated the player from the casting in this context, or otherwise not being able to follow the story at all.

It's important that this appeals to the player as the emphasis of the game heavily lies on the implied Chinese gangster culture. This means that gunplay and car-craze is reduced to a minimum when compared to other games in this genre. Rather than mowing down your enemies it's more common to have to fight people barehanded, the use of several martial arts and enemies with different specialities makes this less linear than it may sound. I wouldn't go as far as calling this game less violent either, if anything, this game deserves its 18+ rating more than the others in its genre.

Having that said, the mechanics of the game definitely require getting used to, luckily this is achieved through a clever tutorial that gradually increases the freedom you have while playing.

To progress through the game there are countless of missions and events to participate in, and not all of these are fun to do. In fact, there's some dreadful shooter-on-rails included. Luckily this wasn't so common that it started to bother me more than I could take but these are things that make Sleeping Dogs far from perfect. It's a missed opportunity to go down in history as a classic, though looking back on what Sleeping Dogs did manage to achieve, it would be greedy to ask for much more. I already feel like a cheapskate having paid so little for what I got.