Video Game Review: Sleeping Dogs

This review is in fact a commissioned work; someone was kind enough to buy this game for me, but on the condition that I write a review. His rationale was that the game is so heavily influenced by Hong Kong cinema that I was the right person for the job. I am extremely grateful and flattered, and it was almost as much fun writing this review as it was playing the game.

I won’t be writing this from the point of view of a gamer as much as from being a Hong Kong resident and film geek. I will also assume my audience aren’t gamers either, so if some of what I say strikes you as stating the obvious… tough sh*t, Game Boy.

Sleeping Dogs is the greatest Hong Kong action movie ever played.

Groan all you want, I couldn’t resist.

Sleeping Dogs is a ‘sandbox’ or ‘open world’ video game in which you control a character within an environment. The game is very similar to the Grand Theft Auto franchise, in which the player can exercise a remarkable degree of freedom within the very broad confines of the game. In other words, you can spend as much or more time just driving around in a stolen car as you can doing the main story missions.

What makes Sleeping Dogs special to me and others is that it is set in (a rather fictionalized) Hong Kong.

You play the part of Wei Shen, a Hong Kong native (with a Mandarin name?) who lived in the US but has returned to his home as an undercover cop working in (and to take down) a Triad gang. 

That sounds like a movie or thirty I’ve seen.

There’s a little ‘titular dyslexia’ at work in the game, since Wei Shen’s gang is the Sun On Yee and their rivals the 18k. But that’s a minor (and probably necessary in several ways) thing.

The setting of Sleeping Dogs is not only gratifying, it’s also refreshing. It’s nice to see a game where the protagonist isn’t white, and the story’s not set in either an American city or some third-world dictatorship that the white guy needs to destroy.

 ”I got your Manifest Destiny swinging!”

You start off the game by seizing control of the Night Market in North Point.

Obviously, the market is modeled on Temple Street or the Ladies Market in Mongkok, so there is quite a lot of geographical jiggery at work.

But to be fair, Wong Kar Wai, Johnnie To and a lot of other HK filmmakers play around with geography quite liberally in their films. So in that sense, it shares another dynamic with local cinema.

It is also understandable, given the nature of games; if you really wanted to recreate a whole city, the game would be prohibitively large, slow, and expensive. So Sleeping Dogs gives you four main areas: North Point, Kennedy Town, Aberdeen, and Central.

How much each of these resembles the actual places is a matter of suspension of disbelief.

As is the idea that you can have a game about organized crime in Hong Kong that doesn’t take place in Mong Kok.

But the game succeeds remarkably well in evoking the city (and the cinema); there are several architectural landmarks which, while usually misplaced, are still instantly recognizable.

The overall tone and mood of the city is also quite evocative, and what the game loses in large-scale reproduction, it more than makes up with remarkable small details, like the trash cans, street signs, and even the concrete posts at the side of the road.

The music in the game is a mix of the local and global. 24 Herbs contributes some of the music you can listen to while driving vehicles, and there are other Chinese-language tracks available as well.

The rest of the music is obviously pandering to the game’s Western audience, though I must admit that stumbling onto a live version of Thin Lizzy’s “Bad Reputation” went a long way towards making me forgive them for ignoring Cantopop.

Much of that forgiveness was used up by the inclusion of things like Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Hong Kong Garden” and Queen’s “Dragon Attack.” I’m all for allusion, but let’s not be pedestrian.

Several locals were used as voice actors, though I only recognized one. 

“You betta reckanize!”

Thankfully in a game with one of his favorite words in the title, we never have to hear the character Edison voices use it.

And we get to see him in jail, which made me weep with joy:

Given what we know of Edison Chen, it is difficult to have to be friends with him (even virtually) for much of the first half of the game.

“Take Numbnuts here to get his laptop fixed…”

The peripheral characters, as well as the main characters often speak Cantonese (I thought the massage girls should speak Mandarin). There is an interesting mix of Cantonese and English both between and within sentences. I would have preferred that the language was more realistic, but that would probably entail more subtitles than gamers would like.

One complaint gamers often have is that the remarks you hear from these characters is funny the first few times, but after a while they become repetitive and boring.

Personally speaking, I could hear that guy in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas say “Those white boys had me on crystal meth!” several times a day every day.

Which is why it’s my ringtone, along with several other things he says.

“That Ese put dust in my weed!”

The peripheral characters in  Sleeping Dogs spout constant profanity in Cantonese (and in English in what is obviously meant to be Lan Kwai Fong.

They will ask (in Cantonese) what’s wrong with you, if you know how to drive, and what the f@#$ you’re doing. Because of this, the background dialogue of the game is a perpetual hum of swearing.

100% Accuracy Bonus activated.

If profanity makes a movie Cat III, this whole city should be off limits until people are 18. The background noise of public space in Hong Kong is vociferous swearing.

The beauty of this game is that it transcends and even Westernizes that reality; whereas in Hong Kong the bark is always worse than the nonexistent bite,  Sleeping Dogs allows you to do what you (it can’t be just me) have always wanted to do: when a woman cursed me out in the Night Market for bumping into her, I kicked her in the head.

說些什麼, 潑婦.

That felt good, I have to admit.

If this game had an MTR, I’d have kicked the sh*t ouf of trainfuls of people.

It was also great fun to beat the shit out of a loud-mouthed expat in what is obviously meant to be Lan Kwai Fong.

One thing that’s not realistic, but necessarily so, is the amount of space indoors and out. If the game were to honestly recreate the tight confines of our fair city, there would literally be no room to fight indoors or to drift around corners in stolen cars.

The apartments your character uses as save points and wardrobe repositories (Accuracy Bonus) are palatial by local standards.

But computer technology being as it is, you could not have a character sleep (the save mechanism) and choose an outfit while standing in the same space. Which is about as much room as most local bedrooms have.

Another detail they get wrong, albeit understandably so, is the air.

It’s much too clear.

But I imagine that if they had recreated the cloud of smog that envelops this place, gamers would complain that the designers were just trying to scrimp on detail.

Frankly, I wish Hong Kong’s air was this clear; I’d love to get through a winter without unlocking the Bronchitis Achievement .

Digression: I’m old. I remember seeing Pong for the first time in a pinball arcade and being amazed. A television you could control??? I remember my friend’s Atari computer that you had to boot up with a cassette. We played text adventure games, for God’s sake. My first computer had a 40MB hard drive.

We thought SVGA graphics were the t*ts.

I say all that because the graphics, even at medium quality (my computer isn’t the best) were still stunning. The ability to accurately depict shadows, glare, and and other effects is impressive, and really allows you to become immersed in the game.

This really is how Hong Kong looks on a rainy night.

Sleeping Dogs looks great, and there’s a lot of eye candy in the game. 

That’s what we call a transitional sentence, kids.

Wei Shen is naturally quite the ladies’ man. However, these dalliances do have tangential relevance in that completing these ‘dates’ unlocks information that is useful to you. It is interesting to note that Wei Shen’s first ‘girlfriend’ is a Westerner.

I doubt they meant to reference The Man from Hong Kong, but they did. 

The remainder of his dates are Chinese. At least one of them follows a very clear ‘career line.’

“歡迎來到奶操城市.”

 One of his dates puts the hot in hot pants.  

It’s just not this woman.

These missions are mostly un-challenging, but at least one involves a fairly difficult race with passengers in the car.

“You two minority b*tches get naked and let’s see how fast this black Ferrari will go!” 

I don’t care what anyone says; this female police officer was obviously modeled on Joman Chiang:

Needless to say, this made me like the game even more. Unfortunately, Wei Shen only works for Inspector Teng and does not date her.

There’s a wordplay joke I am dying to make, but won’t. 

Over the course of the game, you gain martial arts prowess over a series of increasingly difficult opponents. You can compete in Martial Arts Clubs for money and ‘Face Points,’ which increase your overall skill and activate bonuses.

You’ll need the skill and the face when going up against gangs of thugs. 

“我的睾丸根據你的下巴…”

You can use the environment in combat; you grab the enemy, and pressing F triggers a small animation showing you throw him in a dumpster, shove him in a vent, or even push his head into an aquarium:

You can then pick up a fish and beat someone to death with it.

 I love this game.

I tend to be a ‘masher’ in games like this; I just sort of hit all the keys and hope to hit the person I’m fighting. If I was more patient, I could probably do a lot better. 

That goes for non-combat situations too; once, when intending to buy a bowl of noodles (for a health regeneration boost), I inadvertently skull-punched a woman into a coma.

Over time, I got better at it, and once I did the fights were almost fun.

During gun battles, you can activate bullet time, the slow motion we have become so accustomed to in movies. This makes it easier to shoot people in the head, which is worth more points than shooting them elsewhere.

There is a lot of driving in the game, both in missions and in stand-alone races. Again, the awards are monetary and ‘facial’ (?) in nature. 

You can jump from one car to the other, in a move so balatantly unreal that it can only becalled cinematic.

But it looks great, and it certainly is something you’d see in a movie.

There is a rather glaring omission in a game supposedly influenced by Hong Kong cinema.

I won’t tell you what it is, but if you play the game, you’ll figure it out pretty quickly.

Especially around the time you have a big shootout in a hospital.

The story is complex, detailed, and very engaging. When I was young (i.e the 70s and 80s) I often dreamed of somehow being able to inhabit the world of movies. Computer games have brought us pretty close to that reality,  and Sleeping Dogs brings us closer still.

To say it is immersive is an understatement. I’m ashamed to admit just how quickly I got through the game, because I was playing it for 15 hours at a stretch.

But how could I resist a game where I can drive around town in search of rival gangsters, and when I find them I can beat them all to death with a tire iron?

I wish the game went on forever. 

In some ways, it does. Like most sandbox games, there are a lot of ‘side missions’ you can do. There are scavenger hunts, road races, extra police work, odd favors for gangsters and civilians, and occasional random events like discovering people locked in the trunks of cars.

Unfortunately, you can’t take a tire iron into the MTR.

It was nice to hear Wei Shen say to the first of his ‘dates’ that showing people around Hong Kong reminds him why he loves the place, because I always say the same thing.

As much as I may complain about some of the aspects of living here, I do love this city.

Sleeping Dogs reminded me just how much I love it.