Critically acclaimed, Sleeping Dogs is going to sell about 3 million copies at retail in total for year end 2013. That's a real poor performer and you wonder why a game like that could bomb so badly when GTA games rake in billions in revenue.
Wait a minute, what the heck is Grand Theft Auto being brought into the picture? Didn't everyone say that Sleeping Dogs was highly original? Well now you know.
Sleeping Dogs is in essence a GTA rip off. From the open world mission based scenarios to the driving, and car stealing. It's the same. What people expected was that there would be more creativity in execution instead of being just another GTA clone. Truth is, Square Enix didn't try hard enough. I gotta give it to them for spending all that money on the Voice Talents for the cut scenes, which are fabulous. I love the Hong Kong atmosphere and the wonderful departure from the GTA nonsense which have seen done to death. But it just doesn't go far enough.
What Went Wrong??
From the onset, playing both sides wasn't going to cut it. You had Wei Shen, who is an undercover cop doing stuff for both the Law and Outlaws. Damn, that's confusing. This makes the whole gameplay outlandishly myopic as most of the Police Cases are often boring, you get to use a gun for most of these pursuits but using one in daytime just causes the game to kick up its heels and go belly up. I remember testing the AI to see if it could respond when a gun was fired on a desert island. It did send the Marine Police after me which I manage to dispatch with a few well aimed shots. Then you had the utter stupidity of seeing a street cop suddenly running up from the water's edge to arrest you. This is indeed damn silly.
The health bar makes no sense. If you ate or slept to rest, your health regenerative powers doesn't improve one bit. Did someone miss out on something here? In a fight, you have no idea on how your health is holding up as there are two health circles to take notice of. It was downright confusing as you didn't know you were too low in health to take on 9 dudes.
The gameplay failed me. I hated the stupidity of picking locks and installing bugs. If Square Enix made it less GTA and more like Far Cry, it would have been a better game.
Where's my Car Dude?
As you progress, you'd realize that much of your missions are related to driving and racing. I love the way the environment of HK wraps around you as you drive about but that's about it. The racing? It's second rate. I think that it would have been a tad better if the cars could have been upgraded to give better performance but that took too much time to develop and was omitted. And you can't steal a car to race either. This could have been fun but the game designers just didn't allow you to do it. It could have been a great racing game if you had to steal your ride and you had a fixed time frame to find the correct spec car just for it.
I do like the touches where you could race around with the flares in place to show your route but it could have been made better if the circuit was fixed by route with the customary arrow showing the way. Instead of running into humans along pedestrian walks, the route could have been better designed. For example, the racing on bikes could have taken you round to mainly alleyways instead of the main streets and pedestrian walk ways, where street furniture is placed to confuse you.
Turkey Shooting
I love my guns but there is no way to store them. Fuck. I think as a crook or a cop, you should be given a chance to own a weapon even after it runs of bullets. Instead you get to pick up weapons at places where some fool drops them and shoot them until you run out of ammo.
The shooting experience is good. You get rewarded for head shots. But this is something that the games gives very little to you. Gun play is kept just for mission that are related to it. You can't use a gun in a knife fight, the cops will come after you. This is very stupid. There are missions where I came into with a gun but are not allowed to use it for fear of arrest as this causes you to lose your gun.
There are no gun shops. You cannot bring a machine gun back to your hotel, drop it onto the floor and hope it stays there. You cannot keep ammo. You cannot buy ammo. You have no access to the types of guns to your liking. This is all very stupid.
I remember that I had to kill a cop to get access to a shotgun. Once it ran out of ammo, you are left to use your fist. There is no way for you to holster your machine gun or shotgun. WTF? The moment you run around with it, it is in plain sight and people will flee and cops will come get you.
Brawling is Boring
It is true. After a while, you get really bored with it. It is fine that you need to learn moves, some of which are too complicated for the gamepad to handle. I realize that the responsiveness of the controls is a problem. It just doesn't quite register the button hits fast enough.
To ante up on your brawling skills you get to collect 12 Zodiac idols. Fine. That I can take. But the game revolves around brawling for most of the police and triad work. Finding stuff and fighting enemies is based on how much skill you have accumulated on this. There are some pretty insipid moments. Like when you get confronted in a 12 to one fight and the moment you step away to catch a breather, all the dudes are gone! And there are also invisible enemies that suddenly become visible out of thin air. One moment you are shooting in front of you and someone pops up behind you from nowhere.
For those of you who love the hand to hand fighting, it is generally acceptable. It is probably a lot better than GTA in that respect but you have to learn and remember those moves in order to use it.
Poor UI and Navigation
There is a lack of finesse in the UI design and UX you get from it. The lock picking is probably the most stupid. The rest, well, it feels like a 1980s game. Trusted that the gamepad has limited potential in creating a gratifying response, too little attention has been paid to the overall quality of the game. The user experience (UX) is pretty fucked up. You don't get to ante up on health as you are totally oblivious to it and you can only see it once you buy and eat food.
I had hoped that Sleeping Dogs would not be a copy of GTA, but because
it is, it becomes quite a messy affair when it comes to navigating
vehicles. The camera spins all over the place when you are driving round corners
instead of focusing on the road ahead. It gets very annoying as you try
to out speed your opponents in racing and have the camera spin all over
when you turn into a corner. This is very bad. The driving experience should be top notch since you spend most of the time going from one place to another. Why not put in the MTR if you don't want people to drive around? The taxi is pretty lame way to get around.
Conclusion
UFG have taken a safe route by copying GTA in the hope to piggy back on a successful franchise. To be fair, GTA 5 is going to produced at a cost over US$200 million. Wow. Now I have no idea what Blizzard/Activision pumped into the game before it got canned and later picked up by Square Enix. But I can assure you that it is no where near the US$200 million mark.
The concept was good to go but the game execution on how it dealt with UX was very poor. The progression is stuck on rails. If you don't complete one particular mission, you can't go on to the next. You can of course spend your time doing stuff like looking for idols and health shrines to boost your mojo but beyond that, the open world exploration gets a tad boring.
The weakest elements is the looting mechanism. It should be made in a way where each sector of HK was off limits to you until you complete all the levels required in one sector. The reason for this is simple. There is a finite amount of RAM memory on consoles and to flesh out a sector or region of gameplay, you have to restrict it to loading the next region. To get cash, you get to run over parking meters to get a few bucks. Right...like there was a lot of thought that went into that.
Gambling, a favorite with the Chinese is no where evident besides the racing and cock fighting. They should have added an element where you can go to wager bets in Macau, the Las Vegas of the East.
I love the concept. The voice acting is superb, the urban design and idea of a game based in Hong Kong but unfortunately, it just didn't go deep enough as it plays too much like GTA. If this was their intention, then they have done themselves a huge disservice.
