One Life Left: Sleeping Dogs

During the previous generation of consoles, there were two games in the True Crime series. Essentially, these games were Grand Theft Auto clones that actually had somewhat decent gameplay. Even the second game allowed one to take up the mantle of Snoop Dogg himself, and everyone's had that fantasy at least once in his or her lifetime, right? The short-lived series was interesting, but forgettable.

Skip to the current generation and we are given Sleeping Dogs, the so-called spiritual successor to the True Crime games.

Sleeping Dogs puts you into the role Wei Shen, a Chinese-born undercover cop and loose cannon who plays by his own rules. While I would consider this half-joking description accurate, it really is only part of Wei's personality. He is actually a really likeable guy – when he's not slaughtering people in the name of keeping his cover up of course. After a kerfuffle with some gangs in San Francisco, Wei is transferred back to Hong Kong to infiltrate one of the Triad gangs and try to bring them to justice.

Now, being an undercover cop is tricky business and the game reflects that. During missions that progress the story, Wei is given two scores to keep track of: his "cop" score and his "triad" score.

The cop score starts at its maximum and goes down when Wei does things that would be less than savory in the eyes of the law: stealing cars, shooting civilians, running over civilians, property damage and other such things. On the other extreme of the moral spectrum, there's the triad score, which starts out empty and quickly fills up as you shoot guys or use the environment to brutally take out rival gangster. The game once let me push a guy into a box of swordfish heads, where he promptly got impaled on them, much to my slightly amused confusion.

By the end of each mission, both scores are tallied and you gain the appropriate experience. Both the cop and triad have unique abilities to level up, but some of them seem really out of place. A prime example of this is the jimmy, one of the first available cop upgrades to Wei, which allows him to break into cars without the alarm going off. Thanks, police department!

Strangely enough, these two scores are only tallied during story missions. Accidentally run some civilians over while trying to jump a ramp? No punishment. These two extremes in game environment and design seem really flawed and almost make the more serious parts of the game seem satirical.

The driving in the game is tight, feels intuitive and has developed a control scheme in such a manner that driving and shooting at the same time physically feasible, unlike Grand Theft Auto 4's "oh-God-I-need-three-hands-to-do-this"-setup. However, the lack of any actual licensed vehicles took me out of the experience,  once I stepped back into the car I no longer cared.

The soundtrack in this game is incredible. All are licensed artists, ranging from classical music to popular Chinese pop, and even electronic dance music. It's very easy to want to take the scenic route while heading to your objectives just to get a chance to listen to more of the music, which is a shame because the story is actually really interesting.

You watch first-hand as Wei slowly becomes indoctrinated by the Triads. Sure, they're gun-runners, murderers, thieves and drug dealers, but throughout the course of the game, they provide Wei something that he has never found before: a family. The same effect happens on the player. You begin to establish emotional connections to the characters, despite the fact that none of them are good people and should probably be arrested.

The biggest flaw of the game's story is the pacing; it really doesn't know where it's going sometimes. Prime examples are the "girlfriend" missions, short side quests that have Wei going on dates with various characters in the game. After a mission that involves singing Karaoke, the girl automatically assumes you're engaged (something that Wei seems keen on, but the game never bothers to explain this to the player) which leads to some hilariously ridiculous conversations between characters.

The firearms in this game also look like they were designed by 12-year-olds who were given nothing but Red Bull and an endless stream of Nerf gun commercials. The game also makes a lot of weird decisions when it comes to player freedom. There's something morbidly hilarious about riding a motorcycle into a night club, terrorizing the patrons and then wheeling on into the VIP area at full speed, crashing, surviving, getting right back up, stealing the karaoke machine and beginning a mini-game where Wei will sing songs such as "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" as all the people you've just traumatized walk in and begin to awkwardly dance around you.

Overall, Sleeping Dogs is a breath of fresh air considering it is not only an incredibly competent GTA clone, but better than GTA, in my opinion. However, the technical hiccups, awkward story pacing and wacky physics drag this game down a bit.