Everything in this game feels like being drunk: the copious motion blur, the soundtrack of weirdly dark trip hop and really badly cut up samples, the weightless sliding, the sense of speed that goes from snail's pace to uncomfortably dizzy in an instant after 5 seconds of acceleration, the broken skybox that makes it look like the moon/sun coming down to earth like Majora's Mask, the same buildings copy-pasted everywhere, the AI pathing forcing it to spin out and clip corners, the AI then being able to drive backwards and upside down after inevitably crashing...

It's safe to say this would be one of my favourite games ever if it was easily digestible, but the structure absolutely kneecaps the novelty and without that ethereal nature you just get stuck on "Wow, this driving feels really bad!". You have 4 tracks unlocked at the start, however 4 tracks really means 2 tracks with night and sunset variants. You earn ~250 credits for every race whether in a tournament or not, and every race is 4 minutes long. The manual says to "get new cars to unlock more tracks and tournaments", and thanks to the only decent review I can find, I know the first car doesn't unlock shit. That means if the next 2 cars are $10k or $15k... it'll take about 4-5 hours straight of pure grind to even see the next couple tracks? 4 hours of this could probably drive someone to commit a terrorist act.

I feel like this could be the most mysterious game (not including the Dingo Pictures canon) in the Phoenix Games library, which really says everything that needs to be said, doesn't it? maybe i'll try to hack my save and report back

By far the best GTA-like ever made. Stellar combat that feels simultaneously just like a real hong kong action flick and also like a pure, distilled form of 7th gen edginess. Has some amazing car design unlike any GTA game, and great driving control very much unlike 4. Only thing that sucks in the gameplay is that there are too many awkward shooting-while-driving sections, but the tire shot mechanic makes them 100x less painful than it would otherwise be with the gummy stick aiming. The only thing holding the combat back is how half of the basic kit is just never conveyed to the player. Didn't find out about ninja kills until after I beat the game. It still stings a little.

But what really matters in this kind of game to me is a compelling story and characters. The only reason I ended up enjoying GTAIV in any way at all is because that game could string together good characters and great scenario work for most of the runtime, and Sleeping Dogs does this completely effortlessly while also having engaging and rewarding gameplay. Yes, Wei is just the asian-american version of the Nathan Drake 7th gen badass archetype, and yes, half of the character deaths basically go ignored for the sake of pacing. I can look past that for this game's sake. The main storyline is still absolutely riveting even if Wei makes some scenes painfully corny, that final 3 mission stretch is what every cinematic 8th gen game wanted to be and could never even come close to. Side content is pretty fun too, kinda in the same way as Yakuza substories but a lot less substantial. Some of those missions are AWFUL (namely, anything involving endurance and/or shooting while driving) but I can't really tell which parts were DLC from owning the definitive edition so I'll just blame that lol. Progression and XP gating work pretty well both with or without doing side content cause almost none of it gives you Triad XP, making the combat skills time-gated and the cop skills easily obtainable at the start of the game if you wanna do all the drug busts. It's definitely not a LONG game but you can squeeze a ton of time out of it, which I very much appreciate (even if I didn't pay full price for it back in 2012)

Visual design for pretty much everything in the game is incredible too. Driving through central at sunset made me tear up a couple times but most of that is really from how incredible the environment design is, it's smaller than GTAIV (and infinitely smaller than V) but what's almost always neglected in these games is the actual use of the space. Even with a lot of the mid-section of the map being empty space, the four districts work so well as their own self-contained worlds, and more importantly, it feels like every part of the map has purpose. GTA 5 has a huge map, but half of Los Santos and everything north of Vinewood is a barren wasteland that's pretty much exclusively used for padding. Everything in Hong Kong has a purpose and it feels so good to explore, even without any hugely important collectibles. This is something I think only WD2 came close to in a good amount of its map but maybe that's just because of ubi's All Of The Side Content Everywhere design plus the game generally looking great, but that's mostly due to it having triple or quadruple the budget of Sleeping Dogs...

It's really just a miracle that this came together so well. United Front floundered for the next few years as a supporting developer and then mysteriously imploded overnight with an MMO still in early access. This and ModNation Racers are, to me, some of the most interesting AA releases of the whole generation, and that shutdown is still a tragedy to me. I wish MobyGames had an easier way to track where people from defunct companies end up rather than having to trawl through "A is credited on X games with B" forever cause I'm just too curious on where all the talent here went with so many Canadian games companies falling apart all in the same early-mid 10s timeframe.

For anyone who enjoyed this game or really saw any promise in it whatsoever: PLEASE read the VICE Waypoint (R.I.P.) article detailing Sleeping Dogs 2's pre-production/pitch documents. It's like a fever dream reading these grand visions of the future from right before the 8th gen, with such a huge focus on second-screen content (who remembers the big second-screen push? the GTA V iFruit app?), online singleplayer á la NFS2015, and procgen missions. Hell, the article references No Man's Sky as a touchstone flop for procedural generation, reading it feels like going back to prehistory now. Do it. Or else.

As with most doujinsoft, a cute exterior (i LOVE the way EGS does 2.5D) reveals the most evil game possible. the shmup boss is a very cute idea that has a monstrosity of a final phase.. i can't beat it even as a person who's spent too much time playing danmaku LOL it's a real shame cuz i want to find out what the secret content alluded to in the manual is and it's not like anyone else is playing this in 2024

the main gameplay is very serviceable though, the floor-attacking robots are disgusting but they don't show up enough to be a real gripe. fluid attacking and movement, and obviously in a game based on R.O.D the paper attack animations have a lot of care put into them. as a fan, it's all i could realistically wish for.

however, this game's real crime is making yomiko the hard mode. why would i want to play as the paper sisters? Let me play as yomiko in peace!!!
i'm not finishing the game out of protest.