Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition
+ Fresh setting, great graphics, good voiceovers and sounds, overall fantastic atmosphere. In this regard it might be the most immersive GTA-style game I've played - the city feels very lively.
+ Loved the mean little details: How people fiddle with their smartphones, shelter themselves from the rain with newspapers, eat fast food, and when you bump into them they drop all of it and curse at you. How you can pick up their umbrellas or bags and use them as weapon. How people get angry at you for disregarding traffic rules and shout after you that you're the worst driver ever and other things in Chinese that luckily I could not understand. :D
+ Driving is a lot of fun. Vehicles all feel differently in speed and handling, can all take quite a bit of damage, there is left-hand traffic for a change, you can slide into curves, and the police is rather lax and usually won't chase you for causing chaos, unless you do it right under their noses.
+ When driving at full speed, the game starts measuring the time you can go without crashing into anything. This "drive safely" challenge gives you something to do besides marveling at the landscape while you're getting from point A to point B. It also measures how far you can jump with your car or motorcycle.
+ The radio stations were pretty interesting and had lots of cool and varied tracks, both Eastern and Western.
+/- Gunfights were standard cover shooter fare but fun. Probably on the easy side with Normal dificulty, as I managed well enough despite using a gamepad only.
+/- The main story is classic. In other words, extremely predictable. ;)
- At the same time it also felt a bit fragmentary to me. The missions didn't always build upon each other directly and at times I didn't really know why I was doing this mission now and why I should care about these new characters. Maybe I just didn't pay enough attention, but I feel that could have been done more smoothly - unless that was exactly was they were aiming for, showing a few seemingly random scenes from the work with the Triads that the players themselves had to connect to build a linear story themselves?
- Wei Shen's "date" missions also felt a bit weird und unfinished. In the first part you get several missions about dating or spending time with different women (one of them voiced by Emma Stone even), and I'm still not sure whether these missions are meant to show his unwillingness to commit or whether the player is expected to choose. There was a side mission about shadowing one of the women and finding out she was meeting another man, and Wei Shen accused her of cheating, although the game had shown nothing even suggesting that they were in a relationship or even that they had slept with each other. And she retorted that he was dating others, too, which was true in my playthrough, because I tried to do all the missions, so I wondered if that could have gone differently if I had skipped the other dates, or if that would even have been possible. Then again, these episodes suddenly stop and are not developed any further, and since this is not an RPG, I assume they really are just there to show a bit of his character, and once that is established, this part is dropped entirely. Feels a bit pointless though.
- There is a bit of a discrepancy between the story and the open world gameplay. Within the triad missions Wei Shen is brutal enough, but it's never about harming civilians, while in the open world gameplay that can happen quite quickly. Initially I felt very bad when I caused a little accident and a civilian would not stand up again, and then the paramedics would arrive and comment sadly on his demise on top of it, since I felt that should not be a sidenote in Wei Shen's story. But since I only ever saved manually on quitting the game, I did not feel like reloading either. In the course of the game I caused more civilan deaths, there hardly were any penalties for it either and the story did not care, so I stopped caring too and just pretended Wen Shei was still who he was in the story, despite all the things he had done when I was controlling him in the open world. Some side missions and activities even encouraged reckless driving. The most hilarious ones were about Hong Kong police thinking it a good idea to stop street racing by driving all participants off the road with utmost force, ramming them etc. The races themselves could never have caused as much damage as my righteous police fury did. XD Other missions were rather silly, too, like speeding after a signal through pedestrian zones etc. I'm glad the game had no civilian kill count. And I mean this is not Saints Row, in general the game was quite serious. It just didn't fit that well.
- Often you cannot see or guess what a side mission is about and you will only learn that once you start it. But then, if you die in it and choose to abort it, you are transported to the next hospital and have to pay the bill, and if you abort it without dying, you are teleported to your next home instead in many cases. So the only way to get a chance of continuing from where you were in the world is to complete the mission successfully, even if you're not in the mood for it. Then again, this side missions and activities become repetitive pretty soon, too, and I thought the only real use they have is for getting enough Face xp to unlock the display of health shrines on your map. I abandoned the idea of 100%ing this game, just not worth my time.
- At the end of the game I had upgraded all police and melee skills, but didn't have enough XP to unlock the last triad skill, and I think the only way to get more triad XP would have been to replay main missions. That was a bit odd. Not sure if that means it's not balanced that well or whether it's just an indication of my bad performance, heh.
- I never really got the hang of all the melee combos. And it seemed to me like most of the time you don't even have time to execute them fully, as you constantly need to counter the next opponent, Arkham-style, while you're still in the midst of it. So I tended to just wait for the opponents to attack, countered, got a few punches in, then countered the next one and so forth, which made the combat a bit tedious and boring after a while. But maybe I just sucked at it. I hated the big grapple guys with their QTEs, but quickly pressing all buttons at once often worked well enough, and fortunately the number of these guys did not increase that much in the course of the game, the difficulty of the fights mostly stayed the same in main missions and open world gameplay. I avoided the melee competition activities though, as it was annoying to easily survive several rounds just to be beat by the stupid QTEs.
- The camera could become a problem in melee fights for zooming in to closely in tight spaces, but that was mostly an issue in the DLCs, not so much the main game.
- Changing radio stations with the gamepad was clunky and should have been easier. You do it with the D-Pad which didn't work that reliably for me, sometimes, the game did not react to my button pressing, so I had to press again, harder, and even if it worked, I always had to press twice: once for making the game display the current station, another time for switching to the next. I'd have preferred immediate switching of the channel and then another button just to display the title of the current song.
- The mini games (hacking, unlocking, tracing a phone) were nice enough at first, but got repetitive pretty soon, and were no real challenge either, so just a waste of time. The "guess which person on the videofeed to arrest" game was the worst.
- I managed to glitch outside the map on two or three occasions which meant either falling to my death or being stuck and having to restart from the last checkpoint.
- During the showdown, my character was suddenly switching his outfit in the cutscene, and I mean right in the middle of it. He jumped into the water with naked torso and torn clothing, came out in the next cutscene fully dressed in a suit... XD That was really weird, especially considering that the rest of the game was perfectly capable to register what he was wearing, even in cutscenes.
- I started the two story DLCs after the main game, but I'm not sure whether I will complete them. They are really just a series of repetitive side missions passed off as a story, and the one with the hopping ghosts is particularly silly, not fitting the tone of the main game.
That being said, despite the wall of text concerning what I perceived as flaws, all in all I still think that the positives are awesome enough for me to give the game the thumbs up.
Post edited August 06, 2021 by Leroux