Sleeping Dogs is a flupping excellent game but also a frustrating one – not because any of the gameplay mechanics are frustrating but because of what it almost is. It’s tantalisingly close to being an interactive and authentic Hong Kong martial arts movie. Instead, it comes across like a Hollywood attempt at a martial arts movie – an incredibly good attempt but still a facsimile rather than the real-deal.
The first alarm bell in this regard is the English-only audio. Yeah there’s a token gesture of Cantonese in there – a few characters switch into Cantonese for the odd word or phrase and a couple of characters speak exclusively in Cantonese, but it very much feels the wrong way around. To be fair I’m fairly ignorant about Hong Kong culture and, depending on the exact year in which the game is set, it’s possible that English was more routinely spoken than I think – particularly amongst the police force. But even were that to be the case it still feels to me that Cantonese would’ve been the more appropriate language for the setting to make it feel authentic for those of us who don’t live in Hong Kong and have only seen the movies on which it draws.
The combat feels good – focusing almost exclusively on hand-to-hand feels right, and some of the moves evoke that feeling of playing a martial arts movie. But it’s sporadic – mostly it feels like brawling. Perhaps that’s more realistic, but it doesn’t feel like anything Bruce Lee would have done – and when you have his jumpsuit from Game of Death in there, I feel that you have to do more to earn its presence than just pressing the ‘counter’ button at the right time or doing the occasional roundhouse kick.
This is highlighted by the way that you unlock martial arts skills, each unlocked by collecting one of the twelve jade statues representing the Chinese zodiac and then returning them to your old master. The setting evokes something like Fist of Fury. You practise the particular move you’ve unlocked against one of his students, but then it culminates with a now-beat-the-shit-out-of-all-the-students sequence where the whole thing descends into brawling again. It is not this, basically. To me, the combat should’ve been a bit more controlled and refined even if that breaks from realism – more of a dance than a fight – and a lot more use of environment props than simply slamming someone’s face into a circuit breaker or tossing them into a dustbin. Again, don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that it’s not satisfying and solid combat – it is – it’s just a frustratingly watered-down version of Hong Kong martial arts. Yes I know that linking and comparing to a Bruce Lee movie is a ridiculously high benchmark but there you go 😉
I should mention that there are ways to play the game which are a bit more martial artsy. There’s a lock on mechanic using which you can then press the directional keys to attack those to your side and behind – creating something like those moments where our protagonist fends off four people at once. Bruce Lee would’ve sometimes done it using nunchuks or whatever you call what is, essentially, a long wooden stick of course. But it sort of works except, ultimately, just pressing the counter button at the appropriate time remained the most effective fighting strategy. Picking up a weapon such as a knife just grants brutally chop up the enemies moves rather than anything with any finesse. Consider how Yakuza 0 deals with weapons – each has what is essentially a finishing move executed with style, brutality and, often, humour. Or the range of moves available to Goro with a baseball bat (an entire fighting style is dedicated to it) and a lot of his attacks parody playing actual baseball. One of the moves you can unlock in Sleeping Dogs “makes your opponents wince”. Pretty much all of the moves in Yakuza 0 made me wince – a consequence of the presentation not a pre-defined effect of the move.
If I judge it purely as a Western take on Hong Kong martial arts I’d have to say that it’s magnificent – it was, after all, developed by a Canadian company. But I’m reminded so very much of the Yakuza series and how much more authentic that feels despite sporadic levels of whackiness of a level such that it’s somewhat baffling how it can possibly work as a cohesive whole (which it does). A lot of this is achieved by an absolutely outstanding cast of voice actors and characters – I don’t speak Japanese so I can’t judge the quality of acting but it sounds flupping fantastic to my ignorant ears. Yakuza 0 does a glorious job of introducing a fairly wide array of main villains and giving them each a distinctive personality such that you can’t help but like a few of them despite them being hell-bent on murdering you in unimaginably horrible ways.
Sleeping Dogs, on the other hand, has a protagonist who’s delivery of lines you’d describe at best to be… fine? He’s essentially Generic McGangster outside of fights – aside from a few repeats of previous dialogue in what is supposed to indicate him being haunted by his actions. An examination into what happens when an undercover cop gets too undercover, this is not. Nor are any of the characters particularly sympathetic. There’s no Al Pacino and Johnny Depp in Donnie Brasco dynamic, just a plot line where within the first five seconds you know that at some point that British police chief guy is clearly going to be the Big Bad Corrupt.
Perhaps you could argue that the game isn’t trying to be a martial arts movie – Bruce Lee never shot out the wheels of another vehicle during a high-speed car-chase, after all, or leaped from one speeding car onto the roof of another for that matter. So maybe it’s really an action undercover-cop movie which just borrows some themes here and there given its setting. And perhaps that’s the correct way to look at it. That’s not the impression the game left me with though, rightly or wrongly.
Really, it’s horribly unfair of me to be this critical of the game – judging it for what I feel it isn’t as opposed to what it is. After all, the Yukuza series has had six games to refine its formula and Sleeping Dogs just the one. I would’ve loved to have seen where it would have gone from here – the game proves I’m very much in the market for an open world Hong Kong martial arts game complete with Triads, corrupt police, and all of that jazz. Alas United Front Games doesn’t exist any more so we’ll never know what the series might have become. It’s such a shame. And when all is said and done, regardless of my issues with the game, what it is remains a tremendous addition to the open-world genre, justifiably meriting existing alongside GTA, Yakuza, and Saints Row.
Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition is available on Steam for £19.99 and well worth that, in my opinion.