Developers - United Front Games, Square Enix London. Publisher - Square Enix. Distributor - Bandai Namco. Producer(s) - Jeff O'Connell, Feargus Carroll. Designers - Steven Ferreira, Chris Stimson. Programmer - Dave Roberts. Artists - Joshua Lee, Hani Ghazaleh. Writers - Jacob Krarup, Tim Carter. Composer - Jeff Tymoschuk
Square Enix released this game three years ago. I played it, I liked it. About a year ago they also released a 'remastered' version for the latest consoles. Played that one too. I love this game.
Why a review now? Fallout 4 in all it's beautifully crafted quirks and difficulty got me thinking about the tight and simple approach to open world gaming that Sleeping Dogs took. I'm not going to go into some deep dive of the game outside of posting up my category scores. You can find everything you want about the game over on Metacritic.
What's motivated me to pen a few words is the one of the first results I selected when poking around for info on how well the game did.
"Square Enix Reiterates Commercial Failure Of Top Titles"
It's always a downer when a game you like somehow doesn't do well. It's like pulling for a favorite sports team or something. Turns out, however, that with Sleeping Dogs the failure was in hitting expected sales. The game sold 1.75 million copies but was short of forecast. This seems to happen a lot in the video game industry. Lofty goals put forth by folks not good at their jobs ruins more careers than it does make (as a matter of fact, there were layoffs after goals were not hit).
Another game tied to the "commercial failure" train was another I loved in the 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider. I also played that on both generations of game systems and am currently playing the recent sequel ("Rise of the Tomb Raider" - it's great).
Sleeping Dogs is one of my favorite games in recent memory. Easy to learn (but difficult to master), fun story, fantastic music, refreshingly different culture via pretty Hong Kong to play around in and it doesn't overstay it's welcome. You won't see this game on any future top ten or must playlists, but it is well worth the price of admission.
7 - STORY
7 - OBJECTIVE
7 - IN-GAME ART / DESIGN
10 - AUDIO, SOUND
7 - GAMEPLAY
10 - EMOTIONAL IMPACT
7 - LONGEVITY
5 - HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE
10 - X-FACTOR
10 - PACKAGE ART & DESIGN
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80 - Total Score