3/5 ★ – PhatBaby's review of Sleeping Dogs.

This is caught in such a weird place, because, in a lot of ways, it's what I affectionately call triple-A, early 2010s slop. Plucked straight from the era where the CEO of every big publisher ran into a board room meeting and was like: "STOP EVERYTHING YOU'RE DOING! HAVE YOU SEEN THIS THING THE KIDS CALL GRAND THEFT AUTO! MAKE ME ONE, STAT!" And most of them were naturally kinda trash because Rockstar has always been cooking on another level. So, as expected, elements of this reek of messy ol' publisher-issued slop. They introduce shooting mechanics halfway through, which is like using a Nerf gun against toddlers who think they're playing tag. Turning any car assumes you've just yanked the steering wheel clean off the dash, so cars move pretty much wherever they want at all times. And there's just so much scuff that was never scrubbed out, like a particularly wild glitch where you throw a knife and it bounces back into your head, giving you an instant gameover. Truly the embodiment of that one scene in Frieren where Frieren says "kill yourself" and the demon chick just goes "aight, bet." But then the developers went unbelievably hard on a select few things. It's a straight-up video game glass canon. Some of its absolute ass, and then the hand-to-hand combat slaps. It's crunchy, it's satisfying, it looks stylish as hell, and it has SAUCE, bro. It's so good that it's almost hard to believe it could be followed by a shooting section where you can just spam vault aiming to clear a room in two seconds flat, causing the game to wonk out as it tries to figure out what it was even doing in the first place. The story is also just kinda entertaining; we don't get many Triad or Yakuza games unless the main characters are also superheroes who are simultaneously fighting the government and a retired war veteran on a magical Uboat. It ain't Citizen Kane, but it's FUN. I'm a fiend for a cliche undercover cop story, and it works that shit, especially because every scene where Wei talks to his superiors consists of him acting like they just shot his dog and spat on its corpse. Lil bro sauntered into those meetings like twelve year old me when I was banned off my Xbox. It's a bizarre, oddity of a game. A true example of the publisher system clearly being like "pump this shit out fast" and then some developers working their asses off to be like, well, at least we can make some of it fire. It deserved a proper sequel where it could stew some of the mid parts into something tastier. We'll almost certainly never get that sequel, but I'll give the devs kudos for making half of a cool-ass Hong Kong GTA clone, because Rockstar sure as fuck will never give us an actual Hong Kong GTA game.