We’ve talked before about how the 2000s was flooded with an endless deluge of games looking to cash in on GTA’s incredible success. Some were fantastic, like Scarface: The World Is Yours and Saints Row. Well, the first Saints Row game wasn’t great, but the series quickly grew into an open world sandbox with an identity all its own. Meanwhile, titles like The Godfather, Wheelman and NARC dragged down the “GTA clone” genre. The less said about Crime Life: Gang Wars, the better.
One series that eventually landed right in the middle of the GTA clone spectrum was True Crime, which launched two games on PC, PS2, Xbox and GameCube. The first, Streets Of LA, was a competent mix of free-roaming in the sandbox, third party shooting, brawling, and the occasional boss fight against a dragon. It got weird, don’t ask. Meanwhile, the sequel game, New York City, tried to improve on all the elements introduced in the original game, but didn’t quite have the same lasting impact.
A third game in the series, True Crime: Hong Kong, was announced and planned, but was eventually cancelled. Square Enix jumped in though and bought the publishing rights to it, with United Front Games leading the development, and it’s a good thing Square Enix saved the project, as the third time round would prove to be the charm. That game was Sleeping Dogs, and ten years later it’s still a lame sandbox classic.
As an open world sandbox, Sleeping Dogs felt like a breath of fresh air, despite the fact that the game clearly contained so many of the quintessential open world attributes you’d expect from a GTA-inspired game. As protagonist Wei Shen, you could explore, steal cars, hit pedestrians and cause mischief while completing missions from different characters, but the way Sleeping Dogs ties everything together made it special.
Rather than focusing on just guns and explosions to direct the action of the game, Sleeping Dogs felt like a love letter to Hong Kong’s action cinema. While there were some firefights, especially in the latter stages of the game, most of the encounters involved some sort of preposterous brawl, complete with brutal melee finishers, environmental attacks, and lots of moves that would trigger audible “oooooh” sounds. Each fight felt like a climax to a stuntmen/martial artist reaction video waiting to happen, and sure enough, we would get those videos a few years later.
Part of the reason the combat is so good in Sleeping Dogs is because the game feels a lot more like an RPG than you give it credit. There are four different skill trees, all of which improve Wei Shen’s combat ability, from counters to bone-breaking finishers. People often call Yakuza an Asian version of GTA, but it’s an RPG through and through. If anything, Sleeping Dogs is the stopover between GTA and Yakuza, making for a fusion that’s still as captivating today as it was a decade ago.
The city of Hong Kong itself also felt different from any other open world, both before and after. There is a real buzz that is seemingly not captured by any other open world urban environment. Speeding through a stalemate on a motorcycle just doesn’t feel as good in games other than Sleeping Dogs, even though it usually ends with protagonist Wei Shen going over the wheel for hitting a car in the back.
In fact, there’s a lot to explore that can only be found by getting out of your car and exploring, making Hong Kong so much more dense. The city and its citizens have a lot of character, even if that character is just someone who shouts: “a man who never eats a pork sandwich is never a whole man”. There is so much to see and do in Sleeping Dogs, and yet the game is always welcome. It’s filled with content, but it’ll be over before you know it, which is a credit to how good the pace of Sleeping Dogs is.
However, the real star of Sleeping Dogs is Wei Shen herself. Perfectly portrayed by Will Yun Lee, Wei is an undercover cop torn between his duty as an officer of the law and his loyalty to the family of Triads he tries to infiltrate. The lines between good and bad have been blurred quite well throughout the game’s story, while Wei’s debriefing sessions do a great job of conveying his debilitating mental state as these two forces pull him in opposite directions.
In an era in gaming where titles get full remakes less than a decade after launch (we’re looking at you, The Last Of Us), a game like Sleeping Dogs is just begging to be unleashed. With its brilliant ideas and superb execution, Sleeping Dogs would be the perfect remake, and although the 10th anniversary is over, there is always time for the 15th.
It will probably never happen since United Front Games shut down in 2016 and Square Enix sold pretty much all of their western IP, but a man can dream.
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