Sleeping Dogs has not had the most stable development. Originally called True Crime: Hong Kong, it was deemed that the game’s development costs were too high and it was canned. Square Enix purchased the rights to the game, renaming it Sleeping Dogs, but is this one game that should have been left in development limbo?

Set in Hong Kong, you play as Wei Shen, who has just returned from America. After being nabbed during a drug bust, you find out that Wei has been tasked with investigating Sun On Yee, a triad family. Overall the story feels disjointed, it’s like they were going for Infernal Affairs, but missed the mark completely. There are glimmers of brilliance, such as Wei’s brother-like relationship with Jackie, but it never seems to quite hit the mark. One thing that really bugged me was that pretty much everyone sounded American. In fact Square Enix put out an all-star Hollywood cast for this game, which is nice, but this dampened the feeling of authenticity in the game.

The gameplay from Sleeping Dogs fares a lot better than the story. Controlling Wei-Shen, you claw your way up the ranks of the triads by completing tasks for them and the police. Missions are well designed with a good variation between driving, shooting and fighting. Sleeping Dog’s varied gameplay feel well designed, but not up to scratch with its contemporaries. Vehicles handle far too easy, with your car hardly skidding out and having the best braking system to grace the earth. Firing mechanics are your standard 3-rd person action and is fun, but lacks any sort of punch, bar some bullet time manoeuvres. Other than your standard assault rifles, you only get a few select moments in the story to use anything a little different, such as a grenade launcher.

Hand-to-hand combat is the best part of the game, and is clearly influenced by work that the Sleeping Dogs team had previously on the Batman Arkham games. In fact they are pretty much identical. This does work well with Sleeping Dogs slick kung-fu moves, but while Batman has a million gadgets to mix-up his style, Wei unfortunately does not. Context sensitive areas and basic weapons try to keep brawls varied but by the end of the game it feels old. Sleeping Dogs fighting system isn’t broken by any means, just limited.

The neon-lit backdrop of Hong Kong is full of things to play with. Have a race, do a spot of karaoke, enter a fight club or work on your fighting skills at the dojo. The only problem with this is that most of this does not deviate from what you are doing for missions, even worse they provide very little challenge.  The races, fight clubs and drug busts are as easy as Paris Hilton after a few cocktails and they seem like a watered down version of what you get during missions. Saying that, they are an easy distraction and add to the game’s levelling system.

All of the aforementioned missions and side quests all go towards different levels in the game. So for example, by pulling off a task for the cops, you’ll increase your police level. Each of these has different skill trees that are slowly unlocked as you progress through the game. This is what makes Sleeping Dogs brilliant. You’ll find yourself wanting to play one more mission just to unlock that new grapple, or taking down local gangs in order to receive a car valet upgrade.

United Front clearly had big ambitions and it feels like the game’s hampered development has affected their final product greatly. With Sleeping Dogs you have got an imitator, a game that wants to be just as polished as the open-world of GTA IV, with the action of Arkham City and with as much to do as Yakuza 4. Unfortunately it does not manage to hit the mark on any of those aims, but is still a blast to play. Just don’t expect it to set the world on fire.

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