Sleeping Dogs

Calling Sleeping Dogs something like an "open-world crime" game does it a disservice, as it invokes thoughts of simply shooting and carjacking yet another major metropolis. Sleeping Dogs is a more refined take on how an open-world game can play out, sacrificing the over-the-top content for a much more focused experience. The game does cut loose, and the melee combat is certainly a blast. Ultimately, Sleeping Dogs manages to marry open-world gameplay with an extremely engaging plot.

Unlike the previous ‘True Crime’ games, where there was a strict depiction of the city maps, Sleeping Dogs does not portray Hong Kong, inch by inch. United Front Games has implemented GTA’s novelties in way that winks slyly at Rockstar. In essence, what the GTA series has accomplished, Sleeping Dogs has carried out better and more elegantly. [October 2012]

Sleeping Dogs is now the example developers should strive to beat when they want to create a game in this genre, because Square Enix's title is now the new leader of the pack.

Square Enix and United Front Games pulled Sleeping Dogs from the brink of death, and what surprised me is just how good it turned out to be.

When Sleeping Dogs grabs hold of you it absolutely refuse[s] to let go. You'll be amazed by the sheer amount of content, and how compelled you'll be to consume every drop of it. You'll want to unlock every costume, complete every side mission, and play until there isn't a single drop of Hong Kong left for you to see.

Even with the despicable lack of Old Salty Crab content in Sleeping Dogs, it is definitely worth your time. It's fun to run about beating people up, sing Karaoke and jump from car to car and it is made even better by Sleeping Dogs' excellent story and characters.

It is the perfect open world fix in the lead up to GTA V and full credit to United Front Games and Square Enix London for crafting this entertaining, engrossing and deeply impressive title.

Between its fantastic combat, shooting, presentation, storytelling, and RPG elements, Sleeping Dogs has just raised the demands for what it'd take for GTAV to get the throne back.

After reviewing this game, I realized something important: we definitely need a new console-generation, because these multiplatform-titles for PS3 and Xbox 360 really drag down some otherwise graphically impressive games. Good though, that Sleeping Dogs looks visually way more impressive on PC. I wasn’t expecting Sleeping Dogs to be that much of a hit-game but after my time with it, I enjoyed myself quite a lot.

The game is never boring and always impressed by cool ideas, and diversity.

City action in an Asian style casts a fresh wind to the sandbox game genre, with attractive worlds full of details, great battle mechanics and cool free-run sections. [Sept 2012]

With a year of extra resources and polish, Sleeping Dogs has reached it's full potential with rock solid storytelling, nice action scenes and enjoyable free roaming.

This game is a very pleasant surprise that's throwing down the gauntlet to GTA V with its Cantonese oral insult. The game's story along with plenty of gaming mechanics' innovation make Sleeping Dogs a truly remarkable and never-ending joyride with no intention to imitate the original at all costs. I'm so sorry Niko, you've been great, but at the end of the day Wei Shen takes it all.

Sleeping Dogs is a great action game with a compellingly melodramatic story and an atmosphere thick enough to cut with a knife. Control issues aside, it's a great PC port, too - on a beefy gaming PC, Sleeping Dogs looks far better than its console counterparts. For fans of Hong Kong cinema and/or open-world games, it's a must.

The finished game--which only made it to release thanks to a last-minute rescue from Square Enix--won't be remembered as one of the world's great open-world crime games. But it will be thought of as a good, solid one that did enough right to be mostly fun from start to finish. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

Goofing around and pursuing high marks on these leaderboards is fun, but it's the atmospheric city and the varied story missions that make Sleeping Dogs an alluring adventure.

In almost every way, this is a very good PC version, and definitely superior to the console versions. We got great graphics options (including that HD texture pack!), smooth performance, and customizable keys. It's also quite stable -- in almost 25 hours of play I hit exactly two crashes to desktop, and neither cost me any progress. If not for the irritating lack of consistently clickable menus Sleeping Dogs would be hard to complain about.

A messy story and horrible characters get in the way of decent, violent action in a scintillating open city.

The fights, the gun battles and all the little tasks are quite entertaining, but they all lack depth and finesse and often feel separated from the main story and its emotional impact. This is a solid but very conventional open world action.

Structurally and narratively I wish the developers had had shown more courage. But this kind of thing can happen, I guess, if you concentrate on getting your core mechanics spot on as much as United Front did. More of a rigidly controlled experience than a real sandbox, you can't help but notice that this type of game is not what it once was: Once open-world games were the fresh-faced poster boys of interactivity and do-as-you-please attitude. Now they're becoming more and more stale and antiseptic environments. It's not Sleeping Dogs' fault alone, and the game does impress at least mechanically most of the time, but it never manages to surprise.

A solid GTA clone that ticks all the boxes but forgets to add the magic ingredient of improvisation. [Oct 2012, p.77]