Photo courtesy of Activision

Sleeping Dogs approaches the meta game in a unique way. The progression system features apartments you can earn, girls you can date and cars you can buy, but the character upgrades like martial arts or gunplay are based around the triad, cop and face meters. Across missions you are tasked with taking out enemies as violently as possible to build triad experience while being careful to protect innocent lives in order to not lose cop experience. It’s a brilliant give and take and you don’t need to remain careful or crazy if you don’t want to. If you favour one upgrade set over another you can easily divide your attention. The face experience offers other upgrades like access to clothing and car valets, it’s earned through side missions and is another reason to check them out.

Photo courtesy of Activision

The voice acting in Sleeping Dogs is fantastic due to the combination of a powerful script and Hollywood talent like: Tom Wilkinson, Emma Stone, Kelly Hu, Lucy Liu and many others. The visual fidelity is very different between the PC and console versions. The console version has draw issues while a powerful PC will provide for some truly amazing visuals and higher resolution textures. If you have a PC that can handle the extra bells and whistles definitely go for it. While the visuals differ the audio is fantastic across both versions of the game. If you’re playing on PC you’re probably gonna want to bump up the difficulty, the mouse aiming makes the shooting a little too easy.

Photo courtesy of Activision

Sleeping Dogs hit right when we needed it. It’s equal parts gta, shenmue, yakuza and classic Hong Kong crime. While it doesn’t offer the mind blowing amount of content that a Grand Theft Auto does it’s good for over 25 hours and provides a fresh setting and theme.

-Max Romano