Preview: Sleeping Dogs
Starting out life as Orange Lotus, being rebranded as True Crime: Hong Kong and subsequently having the plug pulled by Activision before Square Enix acquired the rights... Sleeping Dogs has been through a hell of a journey to get to the point it's at today. An open-world title set within a fictionalised version of Hong Kong, Sleeping Dogs is a crime story with cop and kung fu aficionado Wei Shen at the centre of an undercover operation to infiltrate the heart of the Triads.
Our hands-on picks up with Wei Shen in his apartment in the less affluent North Point district – one of four corners of Hong Kong's map – before he heads out to meet a shady contact called Tong. Suited and booted, Shen drives out to the meeting point, only to find himself double-crossed and trussed up, tied to a chair. Some beating and torture later, and Shen finds himself having to crawl across the floor to find something to cut himself free from his bindings.
Freeing himself, Shen uses a hanging cord to strangle his captor before making his escape. Stumbling into an under construction lounge area, Shen engages in some martial arts combat, which plays similar to Batman: Arkham City, with easy to strong together combos and a counter move that has to be timed when an attacking enemy glows red. Using his environment for some nasty fatalities, Shen can resort to smashing heads through sheets of drywall, shoving faces into circular saws, refrigerator doors, gas hobs and counter tops. He can also pick enemies up, impale them and throw them down elevator shafts.
Essentially, if you can see an opportunity to inflict pain upon a bad guy using your surroundings, the only limit is your own sadistic creativity. Shen can also disarm enemies by leaping over cover and tackling them to the ground, taking firearms for some cover-based gunplay. This aspect of Sleeping Dogs works as well as you'd expect, and before long, Shen has kicked, punched and shot his way out of trouble. The next portion of our demo has us participating in an illegal street race, giving us the perfect excuse to test out the driving model.
Developer United Front Games is made up of ex-Need for Speed devs and having previously worked on ModNation Racers on PS3, Sleeping Dogs' driving is every bit as robust and exciting as you'd hope. Mix that in with the ability to stunt-hijack any vehicle while driving at high speed, and you have the requisite ingredients for some blockbuster chase sequences. For the final part of our hands-on, we decide to let loose in North Point going on a rampage just for the hell of it.
There are plenty of distractions to keep you occupied in Sleeping Dogs, with offshore gambling dens, cockfighting, Triad gangs to root out, random 'Favors' to complete from NPCs and more. With ambient challenges to complete, all manner of collectibles to discover, upgrades and buffs to purchase and Triad, Police and Face XP to earn to level Wei Shen's abilities and social standing, there's no shortage of stuff to see and do in Hong Kong. In short, Sleeping Dogs is looking in fine shape ahead of its release this August. So much so, that we expect Activision is probably ruing its decision to let the game go. Their loss could well be Square Enix's gain.
