Sleeping Dogs is Square Enix and United Front Games’ stab at getting into the GTA style action genre. It’s heavily and unabashedly influenced by Hong Kong films, especially blood opera—think John Woo thing—and feels like a love letter to fans of that genre. That influence is apparent at every moment, so, for fans of both GTA and John Woo, this might just be a dream come true.
You take the role of Wei Shen, an undercover cop infiltrating a triad gang. People you grew up with are intimately involved in the gang’s criminal operations, so there’s some potential for emotional conflict there and hopefully a hint at the quality of the writing.
The E3 media presentation wasn’t exactly chock full of revelations, but it did give us a better look at some more gameplay elements than the show floor demo had to offer. Sleeping Dogs is by all appearances GTA: Hong Kong, but it does try to set itself apart by emphasizing the action gameplay. The gun-play was riddled with bullet time and dramatic crescendo sound effects; it looked like cover mechanics played a big role, and you can grab enemies to use as bullet shields. It’s hard to tell at the moment how much emphasis will be placed on the sandbox element, but we did get a look at some vehicle-to-vehicle gunfights, the character popped out of the passenger seat with a machine gun and opened up on a series of pursuing cars. It was especially satisfying when the shots blew out the tires of the pursuing car, sending them flying into the air, often wrecking cars behind it in the deal.
The demo on the show floor puts Wei Shen’s boots on the ground in an Assassin’s Creed style free-running chase through crowded streets. You leap over streetside shop tables, shove people out of your way, and climb over electrical boxes and fences in pursuit. The hand to hand combat feels comfortable, albeit unoriginal: punch, kick, grapple, throw, counter, etc. Environmental object interactions are the main highlight of the hand to hand, but it’s probably safe to say there will be a bigger emphasis on firearms over fisticuffs.
Visually, it’s on par with the upper echelon of game. That is: it looks great, but nothing uniquely mind blowing about it. The voice-overs are high quality, the dialogue is appropriate given the setting, but it might be worth noting that they use profanity as punctuation. The music is intense and thematically appropriate, the sound design is really excellent.
Gang warfare, undercover cops, bullet time, gun fights, car chases, gun fights during car chases, and a bit of free running. It looks like a stylish new take on well-trodden genre ground, but it’s going to be really popular with the right audience.
Sleeping Dogs is set for an August 14th release in North America, with the European release right on its heels at August 17th. It will be released for PC, X360, and PS3.
[Connor Cleary is an author, video game columnist and critic, and a freelance web-slash-graphic designer. He is a reviewer at GameShark and an occasional opinion and analysis columnist at Gamasutra. His freelance design business is Four Stair Multimedia and Design. You can follow Connor @The_Blue_Key, or at fb/TheBlueKey, or check out his writing archive on tumblr, The Blue Key.]