Triads and Tribulations
Sleeping Dogs proves that a great concept is always worth saving. It may not have the sheen of other open world games, but United Front has made something truly unique.
Published: August 24, 2012
By now, everyone knows the story of Sleeping Dogs' origins, so I'll try not to rehash it except to say that the game was originally a very promising reboot of the True Crime series that now-defunct developer Luxoflux had started during the PS2 era. True Crime as a franchise never commanded the same level of adoration that other sandbox games did, mostly because of polish issues, which makes it even stranger that Activision opted to kill the project when it seemed it was entering the home stretch. Enter Square Enix, who bought the rights to the project (though not the name), kept developer United Front Games on board and lent some of their internal talent to help shore up the game and give it the chance it deserved.
And holy shit did Sleeping Dogs deserve a chance. We've come a long way from the days when everything was a modern urban satire in the vein of a Grand Theft Auto; games like The Saboteur offered a peek into a kind of noir-tinged WWI France, Assassin's Creed II and its expansions let us see a brilliantly restored version of Renaissance-era Italy and Square Enix's own Just Cause 2 opened an entire faux-malaysian paradise. All three examples this generation embraced not just the setting, but often the culture and historical elements that many GTA clones just couldn't. Sleeping Dogs, however, seems so steeped in the setting that it feels more akin to SEGA's Yakuza series than anything else.
That's actually the biggest complement I can make; the Yakuza series isn't quite open world, but it does have the sandbox-like melee combat elements and a strict adherence to the setting that Sleeping Dogs is going for. But setting things in Hong Kong and then ensuring a deep, resonant sense of culture and place, United Front's open world game ends up truly transporting the player to a different part of the world. I won't claim the game is dead-on accurate, but it sure as hell feels like it, and I couldn't be happier.
Undercover "loose cannon" Wei Shen has something of a past with the Triads of Hong Kong. Originally brought up in a rough-and-tumble neighborhood, he certainly mixed with some of the local flavor along with his sister before their mother moved the family to San Francisco, where his sister couldn't shake her rough past. Blaming the Triads for the loss, Wei became a SFPD detective and infiltrated some of the local gangs in San Francisco before transferring back to Hong Kong for a dose of culture shock.
The story here, while a good jumping-off point, isn't really the main attraction (is it ever in an open world game?). Instead, it's the characters Wei meets and the city itself, which all but becomes a character in its own right. Wei is in deep, but he's not a fish out of water; he comes from the seedier side of HK, and is able to integrate quickly thanks to a combination of slick martial arts moves and a quick wit. Rising through the ranks of local toughs, he comes across a cast that's easily among the most interesting of any open world game thus far. These are, for all their faults and motivations, very often people, and they're made more real by the way they speak than just a bunch of AI routines making them shoot up a joint.
And holy shit did Sleeping Dogs deserve a chance. We've come a long way from the days when everything was a modern urban satire in the vein of a Grand Theft Auto; games like The Saboteur offered a peek into a kind of noir-tinged WWI France, Assassin's Creed II and its expansions let us see a brilliantly restored version of Renaissance-era Italy and Square Enix's own Just Cause 2 opened an entire faux-malaysian paradise. All three examples this generation embraced not just the setting, but often the culture and historical elements that many GTA clones just couldn't. Sleeping Dogs, however, seems so steeped in the setting that it feels more akin to SEGA's Yakuza series than anything else.
That's actually the biggest complement I can make; the Yakuza series isn't quite open world, but it does have the sandbox-like melee combat elements and a strict adherence to the setting that Sleeping Dogs is going for. But setting things in Hong Kong and then ensuring a deep, resonant sense of culture and place, United Front's open world game ends up truly transporting the player to a different part of the world. I won't claim the game is dead-on accurate, but it sure as hell feels like it, and I couldn't be happier.
Undercover "loose cannon" Wei Shen has something of a past with the Triads of Hong Kong. Originally brought up in a rough-and-tumble neighborhood, he certainly mixed with some of the local flavor along with his sister before their mother moved the family to San Francisco, where his sister couldn't shake her rough past. Blaming the Triads for the loss, Wei became a SFPD detective and infiltrated some of the local gangs in San Francisco before transferring back to Hong Kong for a dose of culture shock.
The story here, while a good jumping-off point, isn't really the main attraction (is it ever in an open world game?). Instead, it's the characters Wei meets and the city itself, which all but becomes a character in its own right. Wei is in deep, but he's not a fish out of water; he comes from the seedier side of HK, and is able to integrate quickly thanks to a combination of slick martial arts moves and a quick wit. Rising through the ranks of local toughs, he comes across a cast that's easily among the most interesting of any open world game thus far. These are, for all their faults and motivations, very often people, and they're made more real by the way they speak than just a bunch of AI routines making them shoot up a joint.
