Sleeping Dogs

[youmeyou]

They're more fun than the GTAIV ones but definitely not more fun than the San Andreas ones. In San Andreas you dated around 4 women, and each woman had particular interests. Except, unlike in Sleeping Dogs, you weren't led directly to do what her interest was, you had to figure it out. Some women liked greasy spoons, some liked fancy restaurants. Some liked you if you were buff, some liked you if you were fat. It was a fun challenge, figuring out how to Groundhog Day yourself to make a girl like you, and one that should be present in all dating sims worth their salt.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Wasn't that the same in GTAIV?

[youmeyou]

Hm maybe they were, I could be misremembering. I remember the GTAIV ones being much less varied and dynamic.

[TheLastBaron]

I might be totally wrong but I thought in GTA IV it was just a matter of girls liking things I a certain price range, like one girl liked if you had a fancy car and nice clothes and wanted to go to good places, and another might like everything that's mid-range, and another preferred all the cheap stuff.

[miffy495]

It was definitely not in IV, also by virtue of the fact that you couldn't have different hair/body styles in IV. CJ could look like anything, and the girls all responded differently and actually had personal tastes based on that. It was pretty rad.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Just started playing this... Loving it so far! It's maybe not quite as polished as a GTA game, but it's damned near close. Plus, to my surprise, it does a lot of things better! (Ok, the car handling isn't super-realistic, but it sure is more fun! And the "undercover cop" trope is a brilliant way of explaining why a morally good character would commit a shit-ton of crimes.)

I hope this game was successful. I think GTA needs a decent competitor, and I'm really enjoying what I've experienced so far.

Edit: I see on Steam that there's a lot of DLC. A lot. What's it all for? Is any of it recommended? I feel a bit overwhelmed looking at it all.

[JonCole]

It's almost all cosmetic, with one being half cosmetic and half arena-based combat and the another being a full-story based thing. Those are the more expensive packs (I think they're $5 and $10 in the US, not sure what the pricing is elsewhere).

I'm absolutely loving this game. I've spent about 6-7 hours and it's really get its hooks in me. The GTA comparisons are natural and I completely agree that the undercover cop trope really helps contextualize the gameplay much better than in GTA IV, for instance. The story is just generally a lot more interesting to me, mostly due to the location and aesthetic of the setting. I honestly think that GTA continually being placed in a US-like country is detrimental to the story its trying to tell, as there's just this increasingly boring baseline story that's being told in each of the games no matter how interesting they individually try to be.

[youmeyou]

The funny thing about the cop contextualization is the fact that you are docked points for damaging property or hurting people only during the mission sections of the game. When you're not in a mission you can go hog-wild!

Both the cops and the gangsters kind of have to come off as trusting to the point of incompetence for the game to work. You would think one of the thugs you beat up constantly would ID you to their higher-ups or people would start getting suspicious that every time you go off to that one parking lot someone gets arrested. Similarly, the idea that an undercover cop who gets embroiled in a gang war that leaves hundreds dead just gets a slap on the wrist is pretty hard to swallow.

Yet it mostly feels pretty plausible when you're playing. Which I think is a testament to the game's great execution. Everything (excepting the boring side content) flows together really well. I quite enjoyed the story which was nice, simple and pulpy and the setting was great. Though it did have that threadbare feel sandbox games tend to have where there are only 3 kinds of stores scatted around the city and everything else is a 2d bitmap of store interior (akin in realism to those old micromachine cars that you could peer into)

[miffy495]

I love love LOVE Sleeping Dogs. Playing it throughout December was so much damn fun. The two DLCs of consequence, TP, are Horror in North Point and the Zodiac Tournament. HiNP is a completely separate side-story that you access through the main menu, but it does take place after the end of the main story, so if you're super sensitive to spoilers ("spoilers" in the sense that "oh man, I'm going to kill that guy that I'm obviously being set up to kill the second I meet him") you'll want to save it. The Zodiac Tournament is a side-story, but also one that happens at any point in the main game and is accessed through a ferry that just appears in the Central district, so you can do that one any time. If you're thinking of value for money, ZT is about an hour of content for $5, but presented really well and quite fun, while HiNP is about 3 hours of side-story for (I think) $7. HiNP is definitely the better of the two, but I liked both.

And yeah, I got 100% completion for everything in the game. I may have been totally hooked on it just as the fall term was ending.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Thanks, Miffy! Yeah, I stayed last night playing it until 4. It's got its hooks into me The weird thing is that I'm only half-following the story. I mean I know what's going on in a general sense, but I'm not really following all the characters too closely -- but it's not affecting my enjoyment one iota.

A few more things they did right that GTAIV dropped the ball on: When you get your apartment upgraded, it's seriously upgraded. It looks beautiful. In GTAIV, I couldn't tell the difference between the mid-tier and the high-tier apartments. Also, your clothes are actually pretty cool. In GTAIV your options were "bad or worse". For fun, I'm currently running around in a white suit covered in blood, that gets even more covered in blood when I get into fights. I don't know why, but it tickles me that nobody comments on it.

There's just a lot of nice touches like that which bugged me a little in GTA.

[miffy495]

Oh man, I didn't even think to wear the wedding suit after that mission. Good call.

[Erkki]

I just got the Definitive Edtion and have been playing it since (I'm ill at home and too braindead to do work). Quite good! However, I'm noticing a weird ludo-narrative dissonance, or maybe it's narrative-side-narrative dissonance even: the guy is an undercover cop, and it's made rather obvious that blowing that cover would be very deadly. Yet at the same time he can regularly go on cop side missions. Fuck, he can even wear a fucking SWAT uniform while doing triad missions (I think).

 

Another thing I want to mention so far is that I haven't really figured out what the locking in combat is useful for or how should I use it: when to keep an enemy locked and for how long. For example, to use the batman-esque jumping over enemy, which in this game requires locking, it would seem best if I didn't lock until the last minute so that I could be more flexible about who I'm jumping over.

[juv3nal]

Another thing I want to mention so far is that I haven't really figured out what the locking in combat is useful for or how should I use it: when to keep an enemy locked and for how long. For example, to use the batman-esque jumping over enemy, which in this game requires locking, it would seem best if I didn't lock until the last minute so that I could be more flexible about who I'm jumping over.

 

Bearing in my it's been ages since I've played the game, but I don't remember using locking at all? It's possible I didn't use the batman jumping move either though. You can definitely do the normal counterattack without locking, right?

[Erkki]

Bearing in my it's been ages since I've played the game, but I don't remember using locking at all? It's possible I didn't use the batman jumping move either though. You can definitely do the normal counterattack without locking, right?

Yeah. I think countering is a bit easier when locked, though. Mainly your own movement slows down while locked, but I always have the problem of being locked to the wrong guy, and the vault-over-enemy button not doing anything due to that (which means I missed pressing a useful button at the appropriate time and will take damage).

 

I ended up fighting without locking mostly and I've become a lot better after that change. So it's now even weirder to me why they put that in.

[Erkki]

IIRC, the main complaint about the drug bust cases were that you did not have to identify the dealer yourself? I don't know if that was patched in the new version, but there's now like 40 seconds before the game tells me who the dealer is. Before that I can guess it myself -- usually it's a better dressed guy, maybe sometimes complaining aggressively, or killing someone, or making a deal. If I doubt I can wait or risk guessing wrong, in which case I can try again immediately. I'm not sure if guessing the dealer yourself increases the score or not, but at least it saves time if you guess right. But indeed it could have been done much better.

 

I spent a lot of money on clothes for a big part of the game -- even as much that I wasn't able to afford cars. This is pretty cool, because in most games clothes are usually decoration only and boring. Here some clothes actually change the gameplay.

[Erkki]

Another thing I thought about while playing: the smallness of Hong Kong in the game is actually good because it means there's less filler space and everywhere is something interesting going on. The size feels like GTA Vice City, although I think it's actually a bit larger. I think that is a good size for this type of game.

 

Rockstar seemed to me to have a need to make everything bigger with each release, except GTA IV, where they probably had to scale down a bit due to the sudden jump in fidelity. I think that they kept enlarging the world didn't really make it better, and is perhaps why the series has stagnated.

 

On the other hand I liked that the world in Red Dead was big, but it was a very different game. Anyway, for this game I think the world size they picked is perfect.

[Erkki]

I finished the main story, and did the Zodiac Tournament and most of the side content. I'm still missing some triad points (why did they do it like this that it's really hard to get triad points?) and have only managed to complete one derby -- those are fucking impossible, maybe because my controller driver doesn't allow adjusting speed and aiming/firing at the same time. I've tried to do them while parked as well, but that only worked for one so far. So pretty close to 100% I think, but I haven't started the DLC that is started separately from the main menu.

 

Anyway, this game is really really good. It has some annoying bits, but overall it is probably the best game in this genre I have played so far (I'm excluding Red Dead as I've come to think the GTA clone genre really needs to be about cities mostly). It's giving me a Vice City vibe for some reason -- not exactly the same style, but besides the size being similar, the city is laid out in such a way that you will almost certainly learn it and recognize each place easily, even though there's the almost constant GPS navigation help (I dunno if it can be turned off, didn't try). In IV or San Andreas that didn't really apply, I think (and I haven't played V yet).

 

The focus on hand-to-hand combat instead of shooting was really great, and outside of the story missions and some side content there didn't really need to be as much brutality as I feared. Another awesome thing was the persistence of your car (and even other cars I think). I could wonder off a long way, return from a mission and still found the car I arrived in waiting for me. This is such a pleasant surprise compared to the GTA games where you couldn't really go very far from your car without it disappearing.

 

Some minor disappointments: canceling side content missions takes you back to your home instead of where the mission started, not enough checkpoints in main missions and no "retry" for some side content such as the drug bust beat-ups. Not being able to action-hijack from a scooter. WTF? Those things demand that feature! When you find one it's probably because there was nothing else nearby and you want to quickly jump onto something else (or you really just wanted to take a slow ride on a scooter).

 

Great game!

[Kolzig]

Looks like the dev has closed...

No more Sleeping Dogs 2.

[juv3nal]

at this point, it's probably best to...let sleeping dogs lie

Sorry. Im sorry. Im trying to remove it

[sclpls]

Looks like the dev has closed...

No more Sleeping Dogs 2.

 

Wait, really? I thought they just released a game...