After viewing (and briefly playing) a recent demo of Square Enix’s Sleeping Dogs, I found myself less taken by the history of the game — it was known as True Crime: Hong Kong until a few weeks ago — and its design than I was by its setting. The game itself looks good, but it’s nothing extraordinary: An iterative addition to the ever-expanding open-world action genre. It simply adds a few refinements (along with an absolutely excessive patina of violence) to the formula established a decade ago by Grand Theft Auto III without adding any particularly bold innovations. Yet as gamers and the industry alike brace for the fifth chapter of the Grand Theft Auto series to arrive later this year, I find what I’ve seen of Sleeping Dogs to be far more forward-thinking than what little Rockstar has shown of GTAV.
Of course, from a play mechanics perspective, who can really say? We’ve seen nothing of how GTAV plays. And our demo of Sleeping Dogs consisted of a 45-minute patchwork of game — random sequences strung together in rapid succession. One moment the hero was hanging out with a rangy childhood friend in the back room of a restaurant owned by that friend’s mother; the next, he was vowing revenge for that friend’s death to that same mother, now grieving. While we caught a few glimpses of Dogs’ dense free-roaming world, they were largely limited to the handful of moments when the demo guide stopped to rotate the camera and take in a scene. Certainly we didn’t take much away from the playable portion, which offered nothing more than a brief car race and a sequence involving an on-foot chase. The chase and the subsequent brawl had already been shown off in the demo session, and straying too far from the mission goals in the playable portion to explore the streets resulted in instant mission failure. Dogs’ may be an open world, but we were offered only the briefest guided tour.
