{"id":1431,"date":"2017-06-08T16:33:10","date_gmt":"2017-06-08T16:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/?p=1431"},"modified":"2017-06-10T01:07:02","modified_gmt":"2017-06-10T01:07:02","slug":"retrospective-sleeping-dogs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/2017\/06\/08\/retrospective-sleeping-dogs\/","title":{"rendered":"Retrospective: Sleeping Dogs"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0almost<\/em> 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<\/em> attempt but still a facsimile rather than the real-deal.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0To 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\u00a0were<\/em> that to be the case it still feels to me that Cantonese would’ve been the more appropriate language for the setting\u00a0to 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.<\/p>\n

The combat feels good – focusing almost exclusively on hand-to-hand feels right, and some<\/em> 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\u00a0it doesn’t feel like anything Bruce Lee would have done – and when you have his jumpsuit from Game of Death<\/em>\u00a0in 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/em>\u00a0You practise the particular move you’ve unlocked against one of his students, but then it culminates with a\u00a0now-beat-the-shit-out-of-all-the-students<\/em>\u00a0sequence where the whole thing descends into brawling again. It is not\u00a0this<\/a>, basically.\u00a0To 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 \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

I should mention that there\u00a0are<\/em> 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\u00a0done it\u00a0using nunchuks or whatever you call what is, essentially, a long wooden stick of course. But it sort of<\/em> 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\u00a0brutally chop up the enemies<\/em> moves rather than anything with any finesse.\u00a0Consider 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\u00a0Goro 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<\/em> of the moves in Yakuza 0 made\u00a0me<\/em> wince – a consequence of the presentation not a pre-defined effect of the move.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0how 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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 –\u00a0aside from a few repeats of previous dialogue in\u00a0what 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

Perhaps you could argue that the game isn’t trying<\/em> to be a martial arts movie – Bruce Lee never shot out the wheels of another vehicle\u00a0during 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\u00a0the impression the game left me with though, rightly or wrongly.<\/p>\n

Really, it’s horribly unfair of me to be this critical of the game –\u00a0judging it for what I feel it isn’t<\/em> as opposed to what it is. After all, the Yukuza series has had six\u00a0games 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<\/em>\u00a0doesn’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\u00a0<\/em>remains a tremendous addition to the open-world genre, justifiably meriting existing\u00a0alongside GTA, Yakuza, and Saints Row.<\/p>\n

Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition is available on Steam<\/a> for \u00a319.99 and well worth that, in my opinion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0almost 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p326tq-n5","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1431"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1453,"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1431\/revisions\/1453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}