It makes for stronger plotting, but it does, admittedly, take some of the control out of the player’s hands. It’s the core of the narrative, and the way the game throws the loyalty of good criminals versus bad cops at the player makes Wei’s story compelling, though Sleeping Dogs never truly gives the player the opportunity to choose sides, with Triad Points (awarded for kills, thefts, and criminal activity) and Cop Points (awarded for not damaging property or civilians and solving cases) mainly used for XP instead of shifting Wei as a character in one direction. Unlike, say, Red Dead Redemption’s John Marston or most GTA protags, there’s no dissonance here about the fact that Wei is a good man in a situation where he must kill to fit in. Much of Sleeping Dogs’ strength derives from Wei Shen as a protagonist. The plot thickens when Wei Shen’s loyalty starts shifting toward his friends in the Sun On Yee, in the face of the growing power struggle. It follows Wei Shen, an undercover cop brought over from San Francisco to ingratiate himself with his old partners in crime, the Water Street Gang, in order to infiltrate the Sun On Yee, one of the triad gangs vying for control of Hong Kong’s criminal underworld.
#Sleeping dogs definitive edition review movie#
As any sort of advancement on the open-world principles it’s riffing on, however, it still has a tendency to come across as unfocused.įor the uninitiated, Sleeping Dogs represents probably the strongest interpretation of a Hong Kong action movie ever put into a digital medium, and that’s including John Woo’s attempt with Stranglehold some years ago. These are not things that needed updating so much as exposure to a new audience, and inasmuch as Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition is a naked attempt to put the game in front of more eyes than it reached on the previous gen, its still a success. The mechanics of the open world-running, climbing, shooting-are just as strong as Grand Theft Auto’s, and in some areas, like the driving, and the hand-to-hand fighting, stronger. Its characters are clichés, but well-crafted clichés with arcs that meander from point A to B and layered characterizations that aren’t painted simply in black or white, good or evil. The game’s Hong Kong is a clear labor of painstaking love for the city and its culture. That Sleeping Dogs only receives the slightest of graphical upticks-primarily in textures and fine details-is less a sign of laziness in porting the game to next gen so much as a testament to how well-crafted Sleeping Dogs was to begin with. It’s not exactly unfair to expect Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition to have the same high shine of polish that the Tomb Raider re-release did, but perspective is important.
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