Sleeping Dog’s take on the open-world genre was a rousing shot in the arm during the summer doldrums of 2012. Its inventive take on brawling showcased a deliberate emphasis on hand-to-hand combat, a facet still absent in its more recent peers. It was also bolstered by smart additions to character movement and, more specifically, driving in which the player could jump in and out of moving cars with remarkable ease. Sleeping Dogs also had the confidence to take place literally anywhere other than the United States, an idea lost on any of its peers not called Yakuza.
Sleeping Dogs was loaded with dozens of idiosyncrasies that defined its existence, little of which had anything to do with the profusion of downloadable made available after it was released. Sleeping Dogs’ original PC release even boasted more defined textures and 1080p resolution, all at a rock solid 60-frames-per-second, making it one of the better looking games of 2012 and easily outclassing its PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 iterations. Sleeping Dogs was defined and it was done, and yet here we are with Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition.
While a double-dipping opens Sleeping Dogs to a certain measure of additional scrutiny, it’s hard to take anything away from the impact it originally had. Taking place in a fictionalized version of modern Hong Kong, it detailed the story of Wei Shen and the turbulence that comes with being an undercover police officer. Sleeping Dogs stood out because it actually cared about the heritage of its character and respected the narrative gifts provided by his intense environment. A functional, believable story crawled out, and wound up being the proper ode to Hong Kong cinema we were looking for in those terrible Jet Li and Jackie Chan games.
Sleeping Dogs plays duality of Wei’s identity quite well, supporting him with narrative implications and mechanical indulgences. This further diverges into three separate skill trees, each of which fueled by Wei’s actions. Triad experience is gained through completing missions for the Sun On Yee organization and generally beating the living shit out of every aggressive person Wei came across. Face experience is obtained through completing Sleeping Dogs’ myriad of errand-friendly side quests, and Police experience is gained by keeping Wei’s play style consistent with his behavior or, better stated, not playing the game like a total psychopath.
A better definition came to Sleeping Dogs through its combat system. Its opening hours built simple but effective mechanics where Wei could easily counter oncoming attacks and dish out plenty of his own. A context-sensitive grapple move, however, was the showstopper. When Wei initiated a grapple, other environmental objects would take on a red glow. By moving his opponent near them, he could engage in any manner of insta-kill moves; including tossing guys over railings, slamming their heads in slide doors, throwing them face-first in a giant furnace, and replicating Mortal Kombat II’s fabled hooks fatality among them. Sleeping Dogs’ unrepentant brutality was equal parts violent and comical, but it really served as an endearing hook inside its combat. Most of that goes away about half way through when the game inexplicably introduces and emphasizes firearms, but it’s a fun ride while it lasts.
If open world games can be measured by the amount of diversions they had to offer, Sleeping Dogs was certainly a competitor. Jade Statues are placed liberally over Hong Kong, and finding and returning them to a martial arts master adds new moves to Wei’s melee suite. Most are out in the open, but a handful require fairly intricate awareness of Wei’s surrounding environment. Health Shrines play a similar role in upgrading health, but managing a collection of Spy Cameras is a real treat. Wei could hack cameras, watch them on his PC until trouble arrived, then leave to go kick the crap out of everyone there. I appreciated that Sleeping Dogs let me bring a car most of the time, turning a simple street fight into a low fidelity approximation of Death Race 2000.
Sleeping Dogs could also be defined by the relative efficiency at which it operated. In my original play-through I managed to complete the story, find all of the Jade Statues and Health Shrines, check off every security camera, completed enough races, and locate almost every lockbox in a well-paced 23 hours. Sleeping Dogs’ narrative wasn’t padded and its extraneous content wasn’t overly drawn out, both of which respected the player’s time and effort. In a time when open-world games happily drone on for fifty hours, Sleeping Dogs was smart enough not to wear out its welcome.
This is part of the reason why Sleeping Dogs’ extensive downloadable content run was so disappointing. Each of the three major pieces, all of which are included here, presented Wei with a new piece of operable fiction, but don’t bother pushing it beyond a surface level theme. Nightmare in North Point starts off as an Undead Nightmare-inspired romp against ghosts and vampires, but boils down to a few gimmicky fights and a retread through familiar mechanics. Year of the Snake, which repurposes Wei as a proletarian traffic cop, is fun in an alternative narrative sort-of-way, but suffers from the same problems as Nightmare in North Point; context is vaguely different but you’re still doing the same things as Sleeping Dogs-proper. Year of the Zodiac presents Wei with a fighting tournament, which, if nothing else, gets points for not masquerading as anything more than its declared mission.
Cost is another area where the PC release of Definitive Edition breaks away from its console counterparts. Over the last two years, Sleeping Dogs has found its way onto Steam sales and a host of other websites for less than five dollars. As of this writing, the original Sleeping Dogs release is pulled from Steam, leaving only the Definitive Edition and its $30 price tag ($15 extra if you want to upgrade your vanilla Sleeping Dogs). This seems fair in light of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 releases commanding $60, but utterly ridiculous on the PC platform. Bundled DLC is masquerading as a value-add, and you actually can’t buy a version of Sleeping Dogs without it. It’s the equivalent of being forced to by chips and a drink with your already large-enough sandwich.
With all of this in mind it’s hard to recommend Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition to anyone but new players, especially on the PC platform. The original version still operates at a higher level than Definitive Edition’s console counterparts, and the visual upgrades implied in the latest release feel relatively imperceptible. I’m sure they’re there, but they’re not as striking as similar upgrades given to The Last of Us or Tomb Raider. Sleeping Dogs is undeniably a great game, and hell of a surprise given its tumultuous development history, but on the PC platform it’s wholly undeserving of a double-dip celebration. The original release was fine, and, two years later, Definitive Edition ironically feels like less of a complete package.
This review of Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition was written with a PC audience in mind. For a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One perspective, check out Steven McGehee’s review.
