What could have been great was ruined for me by the awful progression/death system. It feels so shoe-horned in to forcibly create replayabilty and add marketable souls/rogue-like elements. Would have been so much better served as a linear game with checkpoints.

But no, so instead what remains is frustrating because you spend so much time replaying the same sections to get to a boss that will easily kill you once or twice before you can even start to get the hang of it. The bosses i also hated, being way to bulletspongy and barely reacting to your attacks unless you parry-stun them while they do immense damage.

To be fair, i am not great at the game, i usually suck at these types of parry-based combat systems. I just can never fully seem to gel with them in a way that makes the challenge fun. I only really finished it by bumping down to easy. Kung Fu-ing a bunch of dudes is great, and it looks cool, but in the end it's just not what i want it to be and that's fine since so many others seem to love it. Sleeping Dogs remains the highlight of martial arts games.