Sleeping Dogs - A Hong Kong Style GTA Version (Original Content)

What's up guys, today's featured game will be Sleeping Dogs! To put it short, it's sort of like a Hong Kong style Grand Theft Auto. They are similar in many ways.

It's also a pretty awesome game to be played but they lack a multiplayer feature.

Story

In Sleeping Dogs, you control a character called Shen who is supposed to be an undercover police officer and he's Hong-Kong American. He was initially from San Francisco but was later transferred to Hong Kong police force. You can only use him the entire game and you're first tasked to infiltrate a triad (Sun On Yee) as an undercover.

You basically answer to Pendrew, a police superintendent and you have a handler as well, i.e. Raymond. He first joins the triad via his buddy Jackie Ma (who was voiced by Edison Chen, a popular Chinese actor). His buddy was a low level triad member so Shen had to undergo some "tests" by the triad boss (Winston), Shen's love interest was Amanda, who was played by Emma Stone. There were quite a number of popular voice actors/actresses in this game, as mentioned above and also Lucy Liu.

Basically the story is filled with betrayals as they have different triads in the game. We're not going to spoil the game by saying who betrayed who or whether he or she can be trusted. Do play the game as it's really worth playing.

Game Play

Think of Sleeping Dogs as a Chinese Grand Theft Auto. Similar to GTA, it's an open-world concept where the map's kinda big, but GTA's is bigger.

You can fight gangsters and regular pedestrians as well but what we really love are the fighting moves. In GTA, the punches and kicks look kinda lame but in Sleeping Dogs, you're basically like a kungfu fighter. You can throw awesome flying kicks and punches around. It made the game more "colorful". You can also grapple people like how they do in some other games. If we remember correctly, you can actually join fights (as sort of a side activity) and you can choose whether you want to do grappling, kicking or punching.

The missions are pretty cool as well. They normally involve the triads and probably killing off other triad members. The story is what makes the game pretty awesome. It's always interesting to see how they converse and there are PLENTY of profanities. It's like Chinese vulgar words are thrown every sentence or so.

Like GTA, you can do the regular running, swimming, driving cars, boats, motorcycles, climbing over stuff and jumping. You also have a mini map for location purposes.

As far as experience points go, there are 3 different types. One is Triad XP which is obtained via melee combat and violent things like killing people. Another one is Face XP which is obtained through civilian side quests. They are basically used to unlock cosmetic items like clothes. When you max your Face XP, you get benefits like higher attack damage and health regeneration. Lastly, Police XP is obtained when you try to minimize civilian deaths and property damage during missions and can also be acquired by police missions. Since you're part of the police force, Police XP is something GTA doesn't have.

You can also partake in side activities like jacking cars, joining a fight club as mentioned above, going for karaoke, dating girls and so on. They keep the game fun we guess. An awesome game is one where you have a multitude of things to do.

What stands out in the game?

If we could choose three things, it would be these 3:

1. The fighting skills
   Sleeping Dogs prioritizes a lot on fighting. You will often find yourself surrounded by a lot of thugs and you fight with knives or fists. Instead of using weapons all the time like in GTA, it's a breath of fresh air to fight the old school style. You can do your fancy roundhouse kicks and grapple with others.

1. The language
   When we first installed and played the game, we were caught by surprise how vulgar the conversations often were. You will see vulgarity thrown around like it's daily vocabulary in the game. Maybe it's normal considering they're all gangsters after all. Not something you should play with your parents around, especially in an Asian household.

1. The story / main missions
   The main story is a whole lot of fun. You start as a small low-level triad member and you extort people in a market. As you show a lot of potential, the boss seems to like you and you go up in rank rather quickly. The missions get much more dangerous and more guns are involved. You'll definitely love Sleeping Dogs if you love Grand Theft Auto.

Final Verdict

Sleeping Dogs is a rated-18 game which is super fun to play considering the missions, the fighting, the story, the open-world concept and the other fun things that you can do while you're not on a mission. Do check it out if you have not played this game!

Rating: 4.4 / 5

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Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

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