Been dabbling with
Sleeping Dogs. It's quite entertaining.
Good things :
Impressive optimisation. It ran flawlessly on a mid range laptop, with high settings and the HD texture pack. Consequently, it looked really good. :gfxwhore:
Remarkable attention to world building and detail, for the most part. Small things like the PC throwing the carton of noodles he just finished with instead of it magically vanishing when the animation completes, or how after sleeping, the PC will often appear visably agitated for a short time, as though his dreams have been troubled (WHAT A SURPRISE) ; or how when you break the arm or leg of a mook, his compatriots recoil and scramble to get away from you - or your own, or opponents clothing becoming progressively bloodied during prolonged battles.
The incidental dialogue and voice acting are great, too, as they actually decided to shell out for native speakers. Strong performances from the main cast, not at all surprising after a glimpse at imdb.
While it's not a 1:1 recreation of Hong Kong, it's actually a boon, as it minimises dead space. Unlike, for example,
GTA IV. It feels distinct, lived in and vibrant.
Highly entertaining melee combat, something of a fusion of stylistic and gameplay elements from
Batman - Arkham Asylum/Arkham City and
Assassin's Creed - Brotherhood/Revelations. Except instead of batgadgets or hidden blades, the PC has the delightful ability to grab people and then run then headfirst into various things. Walls, park benches, garbage skips, phone booths, industrial smelters, fish tanks full of electric eels, meat hooks, car doors et al. Aside from the varied and rewarding game of run-and-see, there are a couple of dozen different techniques and moves that you can learn, in a dojo no less. Due to the way the game registers button prompts, this lead to me, at one point, breaking the arm of a luckless student 12 times before the game considered me successful. Would have been irritating if it the screaming wasn't so amusing.
Context driven slow motion. In certain parts of the game, for instance, vehicular pursuit, the game will slow for more precise aiming. This is particularly useful when you're being mobbed by an endless cavalcade of suicidal triad goons on motorcycles.
Decent music. This is, perhaps, more subjective than any of the above, though.
Karaoke - which the PC VA actually sings. With varying vocal performance, depending upon your own profiency at a ( fairly simplistic) QTE.
The not-so-good :
No strafing. Mind boggling.
No matter the sensitivity settings, the camera was extremely twitchy. This leads to situations, such as leaping from a vehicle while shooting, where your reticle leaps about completely fucks your aim. Irritating.
Underwhelming gunplay mechanics. Mostly as a logical extension of the often clumsy controls. Then factor in the later stages of the game where many opponents are carrying assault rifles or semi-automatic shotguns . . . Fortunately, guns are rare, and even the pistols (which are, obviously, the only concealable type of firearm) have a habit of vanishing from your pockets, seemingly at random.
Certain keys cannot be rebound, the mouse is rarely integrated into the UI, the mousewheel may as well not exist - except for toggling firearm mounted torches, or between modes on an assault rifle with a barrel mounted grenade launcher. Further, for those keys that can be reassigned, the game will still sometimes refer to, or expect input from the defaults in order to function. This is aggravating, especially when you're trying to pick a lock under a short time limit. Hate lock picking. Hate time limits.
Vehicle handling. It's no
GTA IV. Arcadey and floaty.
Street racing. It's either extremely easy (class A/sportscars), or a frustrating melange of rubberbanding and rampant violation of physics and rules by the AI (everything else). Worse again for the motorcycles. Mainly due to the AI being able to nudge you careening 90° down an alleyway into a bus, while being almost impervious to player initiated collisions. At one point, I witnessed an opponent tumble head first over their bike after hitting a low wall (which would be an instant loss for the player), the minimap registered them as behind for about 4 seconds, then they teleported to 5th place. Fortunately, street racing is mostly optional.
Less than stellar police pursuit mechanics. Either they match speed with you, or you run them off the road with an amusing, though entirely unrealistic capacity to completely redirect your momentum on the fly to ram vehicles.
Foot chases are similar. A somewhat tacked on parkour element, and the fact that your targets are either just as fast, or slightly faster, leads to that unwholesome, familar GTA syndrome of why-not-just-have-a-cutscene-?.
Money ceases to be an issue once you acquire the opportunity to steal cars for the local chop shops. Provided you have the sense not to appropriate them in front of police, and drive carefully. Some of the higher end vehicles can net you as much as (sometimes more than) 300000 a shot.
It's fairly short. 20 odd main triad focused missions, plus 4 distinct police investigations, each with 3 to 4 phases. Also, 'favours', small (mostly one off) tasks scattered throughout the city, ranging from driving vehicles into the harbour for insurance purposes to throwing drunks from an offshore gambling den. Also, 'events', random, unmarked occurences - which mostly seem to trigger when you're on foot and not involved in any of the activities or tasks. I've only encountered two so far, a purse snatcher (who I threw off an overpass), and a lingerie clad woman locked in the boot of a car (who was apparently roleplaying with her husband).
Gameplay/narrative disconnect. Similar to
GTA IV, during missions - you're encouraged to balace two gauges, triad and police. The triad gauge starts at zero, and is increased through acts of violence, with bonuses for using varied techniques in combat, shooting people in the face and destroying vehicles, for example. The police gauge starts at maximum, and is reduced every time you steal a car, hurt or kill a civilian, damage property, or botch parkour timing. As your upgrades are tied to these systems, it can make certain missions very frustrating to complete without sometimes substantial XP setbacks.
Jarringly, outside of missions you can play it as though it were
Saints Row, without any repercussion aside from usual open world police response, which is, frankly, more of an incentive for mayhem - they're an excellent and convenient source of guns and car chases, after all.
Lock picking. Fuck lock picking.
The fast travel system is tied to taxis for access, and map icons for egress. Taxis are rarely available when you want them, and some areas of the map have no icons to travel to.
The plot is a mostly Hong Kong martial arts boilerplate. A WEDDING ?! I WONDER WHAT COULD BE GOING TO HAPPEN AT THE WEDDING ! A MARRIAGE OF BULLETS AND INTERNAL ORGANS PERHAPS ? A CAKE <strike>OR</strike> OF DEATH ?
Lip synching during cutscenes. It's mostly just random flapping.
The PC is a late stage victim of cutscene enforced stupidity. Too many examples to list.
All in all, I enjoyed it (mostly). Recommended if you're a fan of open world psychopath simulators, breaking legs, driving motorcycles into buses, hitting people across the face with dying fish, KARAOKE and proving Activision to be fuckwits.
) And it doesn't even look fun 
