14 DAY TRIAL // 
The rain seems to be close to disintegrating the entire city around me, but as my character pushes his scooter to the limit, I need to keep my concentration up and make sure that I avoid any obstacles and pedestrians on the way to my target.
I might be on my way to a robbery that might involve more violence than a small war but, as an undercover cop, my character Wei Shen cannot afford to do anything to assault the community he is serving, like hitting a pedestrian or using the wrong lane.
Once I reach a gang-infested back alley, I get to the business at hand and use my fists and feet, alongside a solid dose of objects from fuse boxes to telephone booths, to dispatch a few waves of enemies before finally getting to my objective.
This is the basic structure of Sleeping Dogs, a game developed by United Front Games and published by Square Enix, and even if most of it is entirely derivative, that end result is solid, a light, fun, combat-heavy game that can elicit a few smiles and even a few tears.
Story
Main character Wei Shen is back to Hong Kong and he is immediately pulled into a life of crime, with the twist that he is at the same time helping the police to get the evidence that they need in order to bring down one of the leaders of the Triads.
It’s a story that rarely breaks any new ground and most of the characters are just stereotypes lifted from genre movies and television shows, but lack of originality does not mean that Sleeping Dogs is a bad game in any way.
Everything is familiar and there are times when I found myself jumping movies or just looking around while the game delivered exposition, but it’s enough to keep gamers going forward through the story and make them discover interesting if not superb gameplay features.
Gameplay
The best mechanic of Sleeping Dogs is the hand-to-hand combat that dominates the first half of the game and is the most entertaining thing you will do all through the Hong Kong experience.
It’s very similar to what Rocksteady created for the Batman series, based around a light and heavy attack, a counter and a grappling move.
Initially, it’s easy to take out enemies simply by hitting them repeatedly and countering when they get close.
But United Front Games then varies their types and greatly increases their number and the game becomes actually hard and has the potential to definitely take a turn towards frustration territory.
Fortunately, the developers manage to add two elements to make it fun: the various blunt and bladed weapons that enemies drop and the player can use to devastate large groups and the various environmental elements that can be used to quickly drop one enemy, from fuse boxes to trash cans.
If the combat is fun, almost all the time driving is mostly a chore.
The vehicles tend to skip a lot and it’s very easy to lose control and drop Police points by doing property damage or killing a civilian or two.
Gun combat is, probably in a nod to the Chinese martial arts shows that underpin much of Sleeping Dogs, mostly an afterthought and the weapons lack any sense of power.
Apart from combat and exploration, players can also choose to hack security, sing some karaoke or simply increase their collection of cars (stealing is a cheaper and faster options).
[YOUTUBE= http://youtu.be/_H-_7BV8JaM]
As the game progresses, gamers gain upgrade points, linked to both the police, Face and the Triads, that they can then use to get new moves or passive modifiers, and equipment also has an impact on how the player performs.
One of the most jarring elements in Sleeping Dogs is how the main character handles his romantic life.
This should be one of the highlights of the game because of the voice talent behind the romance options (Lucy Liu and Emma Stone are the highlights) and because of the way Wei Shen approaches the idea of getting romantically involved with anyone.
Unfortunately, the gamer only gets a new spot to visit on the overall map and one new mission to perform and there’s no way of actually connecting on a real emotional level to any one of the four options, which is a shame considering the potential of such situations.
This is a symptom of the overall problem that the open world structure introduces to Sleeping Dogs: its overall level of content is too limited given its narrative ambition.
One word about the PC port of Sleeping Dogs: it’s a solid package, which introduces a lot of options when it comes to the video and the sound tabs, allowing a player to customize his experience, while also making it easy to switch between a keyboard and sound setup, which does work well, and a controller-based one, which is the best way to experience the game.
There’s also a specific PC texture pack that graphics enthusiasts can pick up in order to get Sleeping Dogs to look even better.
Graphics and audio
There’s a certain dichotomy when it comes to the graphical quality of Sleeping Dogs between the attention laid out when it comes to characters and some backgrounds and the more limited effort devoted to the movements, some of the cutscenes and the way they interact with each other.
Main character Wei Shen and the various core NPCs all look very good, despite the fact that at times their clothes have a very “painted on” effect (just look for the jewelry that never changes position), and the team also manages to convey some emotion via expressions and movement.
Honk Kong also looks impressive, especially during the night and in the rain, a city created out of neon and sharp angles, a very nice backdrop for the story that Sleeping Dogs is trying to tell.
Unfortunately, the game slips when it comes to other graphics elements: the draw distance is always limited, a lot of the movement is very unnatural and jerky and there are moments when there’s a noticeable slowdown between the various sequences.
Sleeping Dogs manages to surprise when it comes to the soundtrack because it deftly mixes genres and styles and makes an asset out of the foreign nature of the rhythms and sounds, which mix and match influences from all over the world into a soundstream that is a very good reflection of Honk Kong as a melting pot.
I also liked the Chinese voice work and would have liked to see more of the game adopt the language, with English only offered via subtitles (the swearing especially sounds very interesting).
The various actors that Sleeping Dogs uses give very different performances and it’s interesting to notice that the major Hollywood talent, from Emma Stone to ???, tends to phone in their lines while the lesser known voice of the main character, ???, manages to be mostly believable and engaging.
Mechanically, the game that United Front Games and Square Enix created is adequate most of the time and even impressive when it comes to the hand-to-hand multi-level battles. The story is passable, stitched together from a number of sources, the characters sometimes manage to escape their own mediocrity. But somehow, through constant delivery of carrots like the tracked performance and the skill points, Sleeping Dogs manages to keep the player occupied, pushing forward, driving, doing quests, trying to get to the end of the experience not because of some glowing level of quality, but because this is another game to play and complete and there’s nothing to stop a gamer from doing so.
The Good
The Bad
Conclusion
