The game is also surprisingly easy, greasing your ascent from street hoodlum to trusted Triad leader with a laissez-faire approach to time limits and objectives. It's rare that you'll fail a mission, and when you do it's likely to be the result of some physics snarl-up, AI freak-out or rogue GPS trail beyond your control. Quick restarts and the game's generous nature mean that you're never inconvenienced too much.
As efficient as it is at hitting its genre targets, the relentless second-hand mimicry keeps Sleeping Dogs from finding its own groove. The only time the game feels like it might find a niche to call its own is during the police cases, when the need to plant bugs, triangulate phone signals and gather evidence offers a brief respite from the crime clichés elsewhere. It doesn't last long, though, and never builds enough momentum to change the course of the game. The lure of the established GTA template is simply too strong to be broken by a game this beholden to what came before.
It's a sad irony that the gameplay format that offers the most freedom for the player is the one most likely to trap developers in a loop of repetitive, copycat design. They have the ability to conjure up large, populated, realistic worlds and traverse them in any number of ways, and yet still we end up getting the same old cops-and-robbers story.
Sleeping Dogs certainly doesn't deserve to take all the blame for this situation, and Rockstar has some serious game-raising of its own to do with GTA5. But when a game is so clearly intent on being a follower of trends rather than setting them, it's hard to feel much passion for Sleeping Dogs' vanilla retread of established ideas. When compared to his open-world peers, Wei Shen's stoic promise to do "what I always do" ultimately feels more like an apology for low ambition than a rallying cry.
7/10
3,6mb/s YEAAHHH
