Sleeping Dogs Demo

Open world games give you the possibility to experience the story on a much more personal level, since you get to explore the city it takes place in and interact with its people, as well as familiarize yourself with the surroundings. Alternatively, it is also possible to simply drop the main plot at any point and just have some fun, or create your own scenarios across town.

Sleeping Dogs provides you with a brutal adventure into the world of the Hong Kong mafia, namely the Triads, which run the city unopposed. As the main character, your role is to play a double agent and infiltrate the Triads as an undercover cop, scoring points for both sides. Thus, depending on how you want to progress, your actions affect the way you are perceived by the two factions.

The main plot gives you a taste of the violent underbelly of the mafia and it also presents the struggle of the police force, which desperately tries to capture and punish the rulers of the Triads. Beside that, the sandbox nature of the game allows you to perform a wide array of activities throughout the city of Hong Kong, including illegal car races, gambling and even karaoke, depending on what your idea of fun is.

Whenever you do head back to the main story, though, you can enjoy the creative mechanics that have been devised for the game, in order to provide you with a very cinematic experience. Thus, the first thing you notice is the fighting system, which is actually based on the one seen in the Batman series, complete with combos and enemies that flash whenever they can be countered. Naturally, Batman's calculated fighting style has been replaced with dirty street kung-fu moves, as well as various special tricks that further increase the cinematic atmosphere.

Since not every enemy wants to engage in hand-to-hand combat, most of them are equipped with automatic weapons, which make martial arts useless. Sleeping Dogs is well prepared for this as well, since if features a very refined cover system, as well as the classic bullet-time, complete with motion blur and a ton of other special effects. In essence, everything is designed to look and feel as close to a movie as possible, and you do get into the atmosphere after a while.

Sleeping Dogs may try to be too many things at once, but it does manage to be extremely fun and cinematic, in the end. Thus, although the action is very linear and heavily scripted, you quickly forget about it and just concentrate on performing amazing martial arts moves and gazing at explosions.