Sleeping Dogs needs to be put down...

(Okay so the way that these reviews will work is I will list five things that I think are important about the game and whether they are good or bad. Basically its an out-of-five but where you know exactly what makes up those five stars, or lack thereof.)

Sleeping Dogs

Combat: The combat in this game reminds me of the Yakuza series, in a good way. The fisticuffs require a decent amount of skill and is actually pretty damn fun. This engine is pretty much just Arkham Asylum but frankly I can't say that I don't enjoy that engine and anything that rips it off, so far. The only real new addition is the environmental kills. If you grab an enemy, and some enemies can't be grabbed for precisely this reason, then you can bring them over to certain objects and instigate an auto kill. These are pretty fun, despite the fact that they basically just delete an enemy. 

The ending: I'm not going to spoil this one, even though this game came out a while ago and I probably could, but I don't like the ending. Why? Simple, it's too clean. Throughout the game characters are constantly double crossing one another, lines are being crossed, people die. And yet there are no consequences faced, not even a little. The bad guys are taken down, and one of them completely out of the main characters hands so that he doesn't need to dirty himself even a little. The criminal organization that he worked for throughout the game is perfectly fine, and not in the control of any of the evil masters that we met throughout the game. Even the main characters buddy is given a pardon, or at least its assumed. 

Story: The story actually starts a lot better than most GTA clones. Most of the GTA games turn me off because the story is really slow, and this is coming from someone who likes JRPGs. But the storyline in Sleeping Dogs is much better in terms of pacing... sort of. From a relatively good starting position the plot gets really unfocused after a wedding scene at around the mid-point. From there the main character just sort of wanders around until the story has set up the remaining characters and can lurch towards the boring final mission and way to easy final confrontation. Not terrible, since the beginning is still pretty good, but pretty bad by the end.

Music: The music in this game ranges from dull as The Cutting Crew to just weird. Most of the general in-game music is fairly forgettable, largely just what you would expect from a GTA clone with a china theme. But the in-game radio stations are pretty weird... I can't even really describe what it is that weirds me out, but its just odd, and unsettling. 

Graphics: The graphics in the game are pretty gorgeous, very realistic looking while at the same time being quite stylish. The stylishness is largely due to the location being more interesting to walk around than New York, so the game really shouldn't earn points for that, but screw it, I will anyway. The character models are what I would particularly like to give attention to. The characters actually look pretty realistic looking, albeit only during cutscene, as during gameplay they look like they came from Mortal Kombat, and their death animation is literally just 'you fall down'. 

Overall recommendation: I wish I could recommend this game, I really do. With so many god-awful generic sandbox games like Mafia, and Grand Theft Auto 4 I really wish that I could say that this one is great. It does do quite a bit different from the rest of the market, but not enough. Overall if you want to see it and judge for yourself I would rent it, see if you like it, feel free to argue with me in the comments section.