The game's combat system is predominately third person melee. You can melee whenever and wherever you want, but gun play is reserved for scripted scenes in the main story and a few quests. So if you were looking for a shooting open-world game then this game may not be for you.
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----good----
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- suspenseful and action packed story
- you can hijack any car while driving, but not every car!
- excellent voice acting, main character's voice is convincing
- has an in-game benchmark test, all PC games should have this
- slow motion shooting is very fun, and guns feel genuinely lethal compared to melee combat
- melee combat looks slick, and handles smoothly most of the time.
- You can Karaoke! Anyone can karaoke, but not everyone should!
- beautiful setting with good graphics, set on the highest settings; never settle for less settings
- Racing! Surprisingly deep, as there are many basic features that a normal racing game would have.
- large selection of music
- leaderboards for many actions, but not every action!
- each upgrade/level for your character feels significant
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----bad----
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- no cooperative play for anyone, and everyone!
- mouse and keyboard issues, the mouse is disabled in odd places like the upgrade screen or map
- key-binding options are incomplete because some actions cannot be rebound, for example, the cellphone and change radio actions are fixed to the arrow keys
- shooting feels unnatural, as your mouse becomes slower/stiffer when you zoom in
- rebinding keys is cumbersome
- when driving normally the mouse accelerates very fast. It took me a minute to realize the camera auto corrects itself when driving, so you SHOULD NOT MOVE THE MOUSE while driving. This lets you put your right hand on the arrow keys to change to your favorite radio station or use your cellphone while driving
- when you start the game at the main menu, the default selection is to new game rather than continue game
- have to create an account at the official website to use leaderboards against other players that are not on your friends list
- you are kind of forced to explore and level up or the game becomes difficult. I am all for exploring, but this is an open-world game, some people (not me) may loath being forced to explore and do filler side quests they may not like. Maybe they do not want any filler, but every story experience instead!
- side quests are repetitive gameplay wise, but story context for each side quest alleviates this repetitiveness somewhat.
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----still reading? comments----
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First off, each car has a unique sound and handles differently, which is surprising because you would expect this in a racing game rather than an open world game. There is also good selection of unlicensed cars to choose from, around 30 - 40 cars that you can buy and probably 60 cars overall, if you include cars you can steal in the world. Keep in mind that racing games usually have 20 - 100 cars, so it is fairly impressive that a non-racing game would have so many cars. You cannot permanently keep cars you steal; only temporary obtain some vehicles through stealing: for example, if you wanted a police car, you would have to steal one every time it was destroyed or disappeared. Oh yeah, you can only customize your car's appearance by picking color schemes. The 18 tracks you race on are never the same.
When I play a PC game usually rebind all the keys to match normal typing position, so my left hand fingers naturally rests on the a, s, d, and f keys. I then use the e, s, d, and f keys for movement, and the a key for reload instead of the r key, which is the default in many shooter games. This is useful because you get access to more keys than when you are using the default w, a, s, d layout. Additionally, if you have to chat by typing then you do not have to shift your fingers from wasd to normal typing position. Anyways, why does it matter what keys I rebind to? Well, because they do no rebind accordingly in-game. There are many mini-games where you use up, down, left, and right, but instead of using what I choose to rebind my up(e key), down(d key), left(s key), and right(f key) keys to, it will use w, a, s, and d or the arrow keys instead.
Rebinding is cumbersome, compared to how it is normally handled in other PC games. I do not really know how to explain this clearly so I will just give an example.
move down = s key
move right = d key
Say you want to rebind move down (the s key) to the d key, the game will not let you, since d is already used for another action (move right). You would have to rebind the action used for d (move right) to another key that is not associated with an action first, say to the k key, before you could rebind d to move down. Normally, in other PC games, it would just rebind move down to d, and clear move right so no key was associated with it and wait for the player to rebind it as shown below.
move down = d
move right = wait for player to rebind to another key
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----Performance----
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Hardware used to play game:
- CPU = AMD phenom II X4 965, 3.4 Ghz
- graphics card = AMD Radeon HD 6870
- RAM = 5 GB
- Operating System = Windows 7 64-bit
- hard disk drive(HDD) = HD400LJ, 400GB, 7200 RPM, 8MB Cache, SATA 3.0Gb/s
I was able to set all graphic options to max at 1080p, except anti-aliasing, which was set to high. Using the in-game benchmark I got the following frames per second (fps) = 38 average, 25 minimum, 51 max
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----conclusion----
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Although it seems like I have more bad than good comments, many of the bad comments are really just small personal nuances. In all honesty, the PC port was good enough. The real reason you want to buy this game is to experience the almost cinematic storyline as well as relieve any urges to melee ANYTHING, but not EVERYTHING! The game is about 15 - 30 hours, depending on how many of the extras you decide to do, and maybe even longer if you feel like competing against the world on the leaderboards. Sleeping Dogs has many gaming elements like: racing, shooting, fighting, gambling, adult storyline, parkour, adventure, RPG leveling, and MMO questing. Some people may list the many games that does one or more of these game elements better than Sleeping Dogs. To that I say, Fool! Kung fu is for anyone, but not everyone!
In any case, if you are the type of player who has to complete and collect everything then this game is for you. If you just want to experience the story, maybe you should rent it or wait for the price to drop. For sure, anything less than $30 is a steal (cocks eye). . . but not everything.
questions? comments?
