I’ve been playing Yakuza 0 for several months now, which has given me the appetite for another game that is similarly open-ended and features an in-depth melee combat system, meaning I had to reinstall Sleeping Dogs for the first time in about a decade. Sleeping Dogs switches things up though by placing you in the shoes of Wei Shen, an undercover cop in Hong Kong who goes back to his hometown to bring an end to the triads terrorizing it while getting revenge for his sister. By comparison, Sleeping Dogs is a much grislier, cinematic, and operatic crime drama and brawler, but it’s also got some really neat things going for it outside of these hooks.
Sleeping Dogs’ progression system, which tied abilities and passives to three separate gauges, was novel for the time. You had XP that’d be gained for the triads, the police, and the citizens, and each leaned into a different part of the experience.You get triad XP for being more violent in combat, or citizen XP for doing side missions, meaning you get out of the game what you put in. Police missions sometimes involve disguising Wei and sneaking into places to do hacking minigames and investigative work that break up the pace of the open-world action, and then there’s a whole host of side activities to do, as is par for the course, like street racing and karaoke. Sleeping Dogs successfully blends different styles of open-world games to offer impressive range and depth, and it’s criminal we never got a follow-up, but you can pick it up for $3 on GOG and personally amend for that.
