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.

incredibly ambitious game that, unlike every other TXR-like indie project that's descended into chaos in the past decade, does what it sets out to do spectacularly and without any compromises.

Yes, it's biting Import Tuner Challenge/Shutokou Battle X in a LOT of aspects, but it really does use those elements as more of a jumping off point in my opinion. Night-Runners really commits to its early 00s tech-cum-haunted PS1 style more than I could've ever hoped for. Sometimes it falls flat, like in the PAs, but it's genuinely unique. I'm not sure I'd care about this at all if it looked like Project CARS or whatever lol

And honestly, the actual content here is pretty promising too. That sense of speed is a lot to take in when you first start playing, it feels nauseatingly fast even at the equivalent of like, 100mph. I do have to wonder how much of that is due to the sluggish handling not letting you weave on a dime like SBX, but honestly once you're used to how it works it doesn't even feel that bad.

what IS bad, however, is trying to navigate anywhere. All it needs is a "turn off in X yards" satnav which wouldn't even be unrealistic for the time period and i'd have no issues but trying to get in the right lane is hellish even outside of races... Inside a race it's even worse sometimes, sometimes the road splits with no real indication and you have to pay to restart, or in one of the drag courses' case, it splits in two and it's just luck if you happen to be in the right lane on your first try. Sucks! TXR never had this problem but that's because it never had this mixture of open courses and fixed finish lines. It's an ambitious system, and I know it's there for realism, but it does kinda suck lol

I'd probably give it 4 stars if this was the full release but it remains to be seen how much'll change and in what ways before a full release. It's trying so hard to be raw and atmospheric but the writing and purposeful anonymisation of your opponents lets this down for me to the point where SBX's atmosphere is gonna beat this any day of the week... maybe since at this stage it's a Prologue, the actual overarching story in the main game will tie this disparate mass of ideas together better.

With the state of racing as a genre since the 8th gen, even if this came out as a full release right now, in this state, it'd be one of the best racing games in the past decade. I just have to pray this inspires a renaissance. Or more realistically if that doesn't happen, I at least want it to inspire someone to make a balance patch for SBX lmfao

qix but the camera is zoomed way too far in, half the screen is taken up by things that will instakill you, and with the mushiest controls possible. you have 3 lives and they'll be gone in an instant, and when they are, you're back to the start. Plus the mystery box powerup has about a 75% chance of killing you.
I did a run abusing savestates cause the layout and lighting changed after level 10 but it just loops back to level 1 with more enemies after 19. it's such a pointless game that i don't really even need to write this but i feel compelled to just in case it saves someone 3 minutes downloading this off a rom site

however the music is so unnecessarily good that it gets an extra star. i couldn't get cube media player to interleave it properly so please someone who knows what they're doing please download this and rip it for me. i will pay you money

100 steps forward and about 90 backwards in pretty much every area outside of raw combat. terrible level curves, even worse dungeons than the first and the realisation that none of the side content (bar the first few hours of dondoko island) is interesting really makes it a slog to get through those last few chapters. story is mostly great, bar one character constantly doing shady shit for no reason just to create false conflict (even in the finale. why.)

sad that we probably won't see a return to hawaii, i see it like ijincho in lad8: huge potential, well-designed, explorable, but in the end there's just nothing in it. all it needs is a tune-up like ijincho got in lost judgment...