Ah, Sleeping Dogs: yet another game from the PS3 and XBOX 360 era of games that has garnered quite the reputation of being quite the high quality game. So diving in, I expected something that at least broke the mold. I unfortunately have found these praises to be misguided. For this is another game that suckles on the teet of the modern day "free flow combat" and many other common open world tropes we've come to hate time and time again in most new open world games. While not everything about this game is bad, I didn't think the game was good enough to warrant me to finish it and I will detail why in this review.

I happen to see MANY praises about this games apparent "deep hand-to-hand" combat system in so many of these positive reviews for this game. So I went in thinking I was in for a real thought provoking button mashing treat! Not so much Devil May Cry on DMD thought provoking but at least something. Going into the game and being dropped into my first combat encounter. I had a striking realization: This combat is button for button Batman Arkham, Shadow of Mordor, and Mad Max " press Y to counter and avoid any and ALL damage combat. I found myself mindlessly going through nearly every combat encounter never thinking about any of the neat combat quirks or upgrades because I could clear nearly every one of them with one hand on the face button side of the controller. That is not an exaggeration. I thought the Max Payne slow mow on the jank gun play was cute but it didn't do the game any service.

Driving through Hong Kong was quite the delight actually Races were fun! That's it though. I was streaming this game on Discord and someone told me: "Hmm this game looks like it was built for racing..". To be honest with the snappy arcade driving made solely by the great minds at United Front Games, the same people that made the absolute PS3 gem Modnation Racers. I spent so much time on that game as a kid and to see that they STILL have the skill to make a fun racing game inside of an otherwise MID AS HELL open world game is crazy. This is the only praise I have for this game unfortunately.
Side content found you doing cop jobs like arresting a guy, clearing a shooting and arresting a guy, chasing some cars down and shooting at them, or with the "drug busts" you can clear small encampments or dens of thugs around the 5 main locations on the map. After doing that you do some hacking into the cameras, you do quite the bit of hacking in this game actually, all kind of put into a funny mini-game. I kept making the joke to myself that some idiot would think that this game is probably related to "Watch Dogs" in some way with how much hacking Wei does. Every dock base looked the same, every side alley looked the same, nearly every piece of side content was copy and pasted throughout the map with little to no variation. I found myself hoping to find solace in the story content but after driving around, beating dudes with combat you can beat with one hand holding the controller and driving around some more. I kind of wanted to just do some more driving around while the in game radio was blasting some Chinese bangers. I found myself not caring about any of the people around our fellow hero "Wei Shen" one bit once I got so brain rotted from the game-play.

All in all Sleeping Dogs™ has a lot of lost potential to be a great game. I understand it was supposed to be a sequel in the "True Crime" series. But, with combat that could put even the most hard core kung-fu action fans to sleep and an open world that takes from the worst of Ubisoft without the radio towers. I keep struggling to see what people see in a lot of highly acclaimed games to no avail. United Front Games should have stuck to racing games because that seems to be their expertise. At this point I see no reason to continue on with the game and I think I'll uninstall the game and,

Let Sleeping Dogs™ lie..