I never got the chance to play much of it (and I'm probably one of the very few, at this point, since it sold eight hundred bajillion copies) but the setting and tone of the story never really stood out much in the way the past games had. Where GTA III was an amazing step in its own right, Vice City was a coke-addled 80s Miami fever dream, San Andreas was a boyz-in-the-hood trip of 90s gangsta rap, and GTA IV was a sobering, serious tone that reeled everything back in, GTA V was. Each one felt like it had something different, whether it was in time, or place, or tone. One of the biggest criticisms I feel like Grand Theft Auto has come under is that in style those games don't have the flair for doing different settings the way they did in the generations previous. We'll never be able to completely know exactly what special sauce Square Enix added to the mix when they rescued the game from the dumpster, but Sleeping Dogs has one of the most well-realized depictions of an Asian setting I can think of, and certainly the most beautiful depiction of Hong Kong in video games. In retrospect this seems completely nuts, to me. When Activision canned what was then-known as an upcoming True Crime game, they did so with the rationale that the game simply was, in their view, not going to be competitive in what was already an immensely competitive genre.
PORK BUN SLEEPING DOGS PC
I don't even have an especially powerful PC and this game is still gorgeous in motion.
Differentiation in this genre can be hard, but Sleeping Dogs stands out in several ways. A really good, well-constructed 10-15 hour romp is exactly what I got. So when scrolling down my Steam library, it caught my eye yet again. Front Mission 4, Xenoblade, Valkyria Chronicles 2 all of these games are, if nothing else, pretty lengthy. I was especially looking for a nice, well-constructed 10-15 hour romp after playing so many RPGs. Though I don't exactly have the discipline to finish many of the open world crime games - I probably haven't finished a Grand Theft Auto since 3 - I've wanted to dive into Sleeping Dogs for a long time, so when a Humble Bundle came along with it included several months back, I snatched it up.
Had this game came out 5 years before it did, I could easily see it being saddled with that label, remembered as "one of the better GTA clones." Somewhere along the line, though, we stopped thinking of these games like that, and the term became a relic of generations-past so quietly that I didn't notice.Īny fan of Giant Bomb for any length of time will recognize this game. Yet, no one really thinks about these games as "clones" anymore. Again, I stress that I don't mean this as a bad thing, or to take away from anything Sleeping Dogs achieves. While it does add its own unique, and beautifully realized setting, and other new systems and touches, this is still just an evolution of the GTA formula from years ago. The reason I bring this up is because Sleeping Dogs doesn't really do anything especially innovative or new with the sub-genre of the open world crime game. In terms of world design they may have been drawing obvious inspiration from Grand Theft Auto, and they certainly won't be remembered as classics, but it didn't mean they were terrible. But when I think back to those games, I don't remember them being particularly bad. Some of the most notable victims of this label would be the True Crime games, the Mafia series, or perhaps most known, Saints Row. I remember in the ensuing years after Grand Theft Auto 3 came out, the phrase "GTA Clone" was everywhere, applied to virtually any game that emulated the kind of open world crime game that GTA was. There's not a lot of unusual artistic styles in box art design these days.Īt what point in time did we stop thinking about games like this as "Grand Theft Auto Clones"? It's something I've been thinking about after finishing Sleeping Dogs.