Hello. Today I would like to talk about a game that I consider one of the best GTA clones, if not the best. So, Sleeping Dogs.
The beginning of the story.
Set in Hong Kong. Wei Shen returns to his hometown after living in America for half his life. He immediately tries to pull off a drug deal, but is arrested. While sitting behind bars at the police station, he meets a childhood friend named Jackie Ma. He is part of a gang that is part of the Song On Yi triad, and promises to vouch for Wei if he wants to join them. Soon Wei is called in for questioning and told that everything is going according to plan. It turns out that Wei is actually an undercover police officer and this entire operation was aimed at infiltrating him into Soon On Yee to further destroy this organization.
Upon his release, Wei meets with Jackie, and he, as promised, vouches for him to the leader of his gang. Although not without suspicion, Wei is accepted, and Inspector Shen begins his journey up the criminal career ladder.
I will write more about the plot towards the end of the blog, since it is perhaps the main advantage of the game, and I want to leave the sweet for last. So for now let’s talk about the gameplay.
Combat.
Melee.
And I’ll start, perhaps, with the combat system. We have a game here in the style of Hong Kong action films, so the emphasis here is on close combat. And he’s awesome! The creators took Batman’s combat as a basis, but they made enough changes and additions to make it look original.
There are weak and strong blows, counterattack, capture, as well as interaction with the environment. The toolkit is not that big, but that’s more of a plus. It is very easy to learn, but has a fairly large list of combinations.
For example, when you grab an enemy, you have several options. You can just throw him on the floor or into a wall, you can hit him with weak blows, or you can combine them with strong ones and Wei will perform other techniques that will either knock down the enemy or take off more lives, or you can simply use an environmental object and carry out an instant finishing move (for example, put your forehead on the bayonet of a swordfish or drive your head into a fan). You can also perform a running strike, which most often the enemy cannot block, or jump off the wall and smack the brow with your foot in flight. Well, simple combinations of weak and strong blows are also very effective.
At the beginning, the player doesn’t have that many techniques, but as they level up, more and more are revealed. Although it’s extremely difficult to get bored with the initial set.
There are also several types of enemies. Some are just meat to fight, some are impenetrable in a block and it is better to hit them through grabs, some need to be disarmed first, and the healthiest opponents at first are almost invulnerable and you can only catch them with counterattacks (with leveling up this is corrected and towards the end of the game they no longer pose such a threat). One way or another, you need to find a special approach to each opponent.
All this makes the combat simple, but at the same time quite deep and varied. And thanks to the beautiful animations, it also looks incredibly spectacular.
Shootouts.
To begin with, let me clarify that when I say “shooting” and “shooting” I will mean slightly different things. I call shooting technical execution. That is, the recoil from a weapon when fired, the reaction of enemy bodies to being hit, sounds, etc. And by “shootouts” I mean the production part: game design of locations, AI of enemies, explosions per square meter, moving around the map, and so on.
So that’s what I’m talking https://pixbetcasino.co.uk/login/ about. The shooting in this game is not the best. There are few weapons, no recoil, sounds are not the most realistic, there is no dismemberment, and enemies react to shots with mediocre ragdoll. But the shootouts here are wildly cool!
Firstly, there is slowmo, and it makes any shootout a hundred times cooler. Secondly, all the locations in which armed clashes take place are very memorable. I will give examples under hidden text, as they may be spoilers. But in short, these are extremely expressive places, like a museum (it’s not really here, I just gave it as an example).
Wedding, hospital, funeral, construction site, club, restaurant and so on.
Thirdly, the game design here is built in such a way that you can’t just sit behind cover, you have to move forward all the time. The enemy AI isn’t the smartest, but it’s smart enough to keep you on the edge of your seat.
All this creates incredible dynamics. And despite the technical execution, when you jump over cover using parkour and take away the weapon of the enemy who was sitting behind him, and then jump from the second floor and in flight in slow motion give headshots to everyone, you have only one thought in your head – “Cool!”.
Parkour and riding.
The game has parkour. Most of all it is similar to how it is executed in Watch Dogs. It’s literally one-button. You just need to hold down the sprint key and press it sharply in front of an obstacle. But the animations for overcoming cover are quite beautiful and stylish, so it’s nice to parkour here. True, there are three routes for this in the whole game, jokes. But no one forbids using it during combat, which also adds significant variety.
The ride here isn’t the most physical and is rather wooden, but it’s not infuriating and quite easy to control. Plus, during chases there are several tricks, such as the ability to ram an enemy or jump at full speed from one car to another (hello Wheelman). And if we go through all the races, then we will be given a car with two machine guns and an emy wave, which will stop all the cars in the vicinity .
Speaking of racing. They are funny. Enemies are always crashing into each other, then into the environment, then into us. In short, simple, but not boring.
Open world and activities.
The map is quite extensive, but not the largest. You can drive around its perimeter in about twenty minutes. Hong Kong consists of four districts, each of which has its own style. Here you will find slums, a major district, and docks with factories.
In addition to the main plot, there are several side quests in which you need to either take someone or beat them. Of these, there are a couple of interesting series of missions in which one guy is always doing some kind of bullshit and asks us to take him away from the crime scene (In the first mission, he decided to hit the cop guy who was hitting on his girlfriend. Although, as it turned out later, she is not his girlfriend, but he just likes her.). In addition there are several police missions. In them you need to make an arrest, save a hostage, stop a robbery, and so on. All of them can be completed in a couple of minutes, if not less, so you don’t have time to get bored. Also, sometimes there are random mini-events, such as chasing a thief, or rescuing a hostage (At one point I heard a sound from the trunk of a car in which a girl was. True, as it turned out, no one kidnapped her, but she just arranged role-playing games with her boyfriend, and I ruined everything for them.)
There are still races. And as I mentioned above, they are fun, and completing them opens a separate branch of missions with a super car, after which you can keep this car for yourself.
Well, how can you not mention dating?? Throughout the game, Wei will be in contact with several passions, with each of whom you can go on a date. You will need to have a photo shoot with someone, go through a hacking mini-game with someone, take part in races, park smoke, and also sing karaoke. After completing these missions, the locations of collectoballs are revealed on the map. Speaking of them.
There are several types of collectibles in the game: altars that increase health, cameras for hacking, with which you can detain bandits, figurines of the seasons, for which we will upgrade our combat, and also safes with money are scattered in each area. And what’s important. It’s absolutely not stuffy to collect all this. I collected about half of everything just by taking what came my way while I was playing through the story. But towards the end of the game I decided to collect everything that was left and just drove around the city for two hours collecting it all. And I wasn’t stressed, because all this time great music was playing on the game radio and I just enjoyed the atmosphere. And for finding all this we are given cool costumes and other items of clothing. Well, plus, all this is diluted with mini-games with hacking cameras and locks, as well as battles. So I got 100% on in-game statistics without any problems.
I haven’t yet mentioned poker, underground fighting, cockfighting and karaoke. But there’s not much to say about them. Underground battles are another way to get high from combat, and the rest are cool mini-games.
In general, it’s nice to be in this world. I didn’t feel like doing all this, and as I already said, I completed the game 100% without any stress. But all this can be ignored without any problems and go purely according to the plot, which we have finally come to.
General opinion about the plot.
At the beginning I said that the plot, that the plot is the main advantage of the game. And I think so for several reasons.
First reason: This is simply a good crime thriller and action film. Events develop very quickly, and you don’t have time to get bored. Plus there are almost no filler missions here. In each task the story develops. Even at the very beginning, when Wei is still only a six, he immediately encourages his friend to do some big thing so that they can prove themselves and get promoted. And the higher Wei’s position in Song On Yi, the easier it will be for him to destroy them, so even the very first missions about an ordinary robbery develop the plot. And from the moment the main character takes the position of gang leader after a third of the game, the plot hardly allows the player to rest at all, plunging him into triadic intrigues, gang wars, police investigations and betrayals.
Second reason: Characters. The game has very memorable characters. The street bandits, high on steroids and looking like American gangsters, the more pretentious and calm leaders of the triad, the cops who help the main character, and even the girls with whom the hero goes on dates. They are all very colorful and expressive personalities with their own views and philosophy.
Except it turned out a little strange with the villains. For about two thirds of the game, the main antagonist will be a person with whom Vea has a conflict in the past. And he may not be the most charismatic, but all this time he ruins the life of the main character and really feels like a personal enemy for him. However, at some point he is defeated, and the main villain becomes the dude who stood behind him. And now he’s not impressive anymore. Just an evil devil who does evil things with an evil look. The previous one, at least in the dialogues, could have teased Wei and gloated, but this one is not interesting at all.
Third reason: Main character. While in other similar games the hero is very often more of a participant and performer of events than their initiator (hello GTA 4 and the second mafia), Wei Shen is the natural engine of history, who throughout the game goes forward, punishing everyone who does not believe in him or doubts him, both the triad and the cops. He manifests himself so that the triad notices him. He himself ingratiates himself with the crime bosses so that they begin to consider him theirs. When he becomes one of them, he never doubts, and immediately shows himself as a leader and a reliable ally. He himself offers his assistance to the police in investigations, so as not to forget who he really is.
And throughout this time Wei will be cool. If someone bullies him, he immediately puts him in his place. If someone attacks him, he immediately fights back. If a problem arises, he immediately begins to solve it. Wei is never a victim. It’s like a tornado sweeping through the triad, sweeping away everything in its path.
However, he is not devoid of emotions. He has a rather tragic past. And throughout the entire game he really becomes part of the triad, albeit without admitting it. His gang members begin to consider him their family, and he considers them too. Wei is too good at being a gangster and towards the end of the game you really start to wonder “Will he still be a cop?”? ”. During my first playthrough, I actually thought there would be multiple endings.
But no, she’s here alone. And she’s a little blurry. That is, the ending itself is quite large-scale and epic, but this very conflict between a gangster and a cop inside the main character is resolved somehow by itself. Events develop in such a way that Wei does not have to choose between two paths. Everything plays into his hands and, in fact, he wins on both sides. I’ll describe it in more detail under the spoiler.
The fact is that at the end Wei fights with one of the leaders of the triad, who declared war on everyone else. And after defeating him, Wei returns to the police, and his allies from the triad let him go in peace, since technically he did not betray them, but eliminated the one who was causing them problems. And Wei didn’t quarrel with his friends from the police at all, with the exception of his curator, who betrayed him. So it turns out that neither the cops nor the gangsters have any complaints against Wei. And this is more due to the circumstances than to him himself.
By the way, the game mentions several times that Wei’s sister died from a predose. And if you read the reports that we receive on the phone, you can find out that Wei, while undercover in America, found the dealer who sold her the drugs and killed him. And the cops hushed up the matter. So Wei, in fact, was never a unequivocally honest cop.
Fourth reason: Missions. The game design here is aimed at only one thing – drive. Almost every mission in this game is an attraction of fights, shootouts, chases with jumping from car to car, parkour and explosions. And all this can happen in fifteen minutes. The dynamics in the game are simply incredible and it’s almost impossible to get bored here. You are constantly moving forward and you have neither the time nor the desire to stop. In fact, each mission is a very competent combination of gameplay elements that I described above. And that’s cool.
