I think Sleeping Dogs is the greatest open-world action game ever made. Better in every way to any GTA game except for size. I found it it was Sleeping Dog's 10th from GOG's Facebook page.

They missed an opportunity to promote it on the website, and give it a sale. Buy the game, but not today. Full price is ridiculous, I think I paid $7 USD.

I don't know if "... Sleeping Dogs is the greatest open-world action game ever made." But it is a great game IMO.

While missing the anniversary, it goes on sale often. If memory serves me, about $3 USD has been the usual sale price.

It's one of my favorites. Great narrative that strangely fits the game play. As a cop infiltrating the Chinese gangs, your ability to play as both cop and criminal is really emphasized here. Do you play almost solely as a policeman and bust the bad guys or do you really dive into the gang warfare and truly delve the depths of your own depravity? Most players will liberally explore both. The wedding scenario near the end of the game is one of my favorite set pieces ever played.

I bought it for 3€ a little over a year ago. I'll get around to playing it eventually.

I bought this game on GOG a long time ago and it's been sitting in my backlog ever since.

"Open world" is rarely a good selling point though. Most of the time, that is code word for the same crap copy & pasted over and over again endlessly, which results in players grinding out the same exact content endlessly, which is the antithesis of fun (a great example are the endlessly copy & pasted forts in AC: Odyssey).

You won't be sorry! That's one of the things that makes Sleeping Dogs brilliant. A smaller, tightly focused map, with every inch hand crafted. Open in the sense that you can go anywhere and interact with everything on the map.

I miss the opportunity to play it when it came out, I bought it when it was released here on GOG, yet I still have to install it. Hear is really good and has a great combat system, plus I'm a big fan of martial arts movies.

That does sound better than other open world games. Maybe I'll give it a try.

How about other stupid annoying stuff in open world games, like "collectables" which always aggravating and boring to collect?

Or how about stupid & annoying minigames?

The other week I was playing the second Arkham game and I kept ragequitting because of all the stupid crap they put into it in order to "fill out" the open world. I.e. Riddler trophies, gliding challenges where you have to float through a series of rings in the exact right way, and the gameplay is constantly slowed down to a crawl because you have to solve "puzzles" in order to figure out where the entrance to the next room and/or level is.

Or another example would be the abysmal RC missions in the GTA games.

Does Sleeping Dogs have any stupid anti-fun crap like that in it?

Second in one of the greatest open-world action games and ive played a few.

Ive never played GTA but did play Red Dead Redemption 2 and Yakuza 0 and 1, probably the other two open world games similar to Sleeping Dogs (I hear that GTA's combat system is almost the same as RDR2, just minus the dead eye ability).

I will say that in terms of combat, Red Dead Redemption has pretty good gunplay. Everything is auto-target and the combat is honestly not as good as other games like Days imo but its decent. However, RDR and from what I hear, GTA, has terrible melee (not that you are ever really meant to melee).

Yakuza, on the other hand, has amazing melee but terrible gun combat. You can combo, counter, mix moves, change styles, etc but the guns are janky at best.

Sleeping Dogs does the impossible by having both fun melee and gun combat. Melee relies on positioning, counters, and using the environment which invokes heat actions from Yakuza and while the gun combat is decent with no auto-aim, it really shines when you combine with stunts that reward you with slow motion as well as disarming the opponent.

I do think there are some drawbacks with the game. The mission scoring system is a little whack with cop exp and triad exp is not great and you want to want to grind for face exp early game to get the clothes to maximize triad exp imo (I believe the game fixed this by adding more missions that reward triad exp but in early editions, you couldnt get max triad exp if you didnt prepare well which could lock you out of the achievement since no new game+). The world is also smaller with less to do than in GTA or Yakuza but given the age of this game, I dont think its fair to hold that against it.

It also does get a little frustrating playing it at first but once it clicks, its great.

If Memory serves me right statues to unlock some fighting moves and candles/statue thing need interacted with to up some stats but thats about it ..I think the only thing thats still the standard is some lockpicking mini game to get in locked chests but thats super small

Yes, there are collectables like every other open world game but not as many iirc. I dont remember if mahjong poker was necessary for any achievements but I think cockfighting was and that was an annoying minigame (kind of RNG-based). Not too bad though. The other minigames are simple and can be annoying/repetitive but not frustratingly difficult.

There are some difficult missions but the I dont remember any being super annoying.

There are health shrines that heal you once and increase your max health every nth shrine and money cases.
The Saboteur is great, but it has some unfortunate bugs (some screen resolutions make it crash if you open some menus and one of the perks is not unlocked permanently).

City design is amazing. I really liked just driving around through highways and streets.

Melee combat system surprisingly complex and quite demanding at first, at least until you get used to countering. Trying to play it like generic modern action game and mashing attack button until everyone is down you'll be dead in no time. On the other hand after mastering counter attacks you can finish 90% fights with zero damage but it was still satisfying and fun. I was always sad when there was shooting mission.

Driving is fun but also completely ridiculous. All cars are like tanks, almost indestructible. With motorcycles you can ram into things at full speed and rarely will be thrown off.

Story and characters are bland and rather disappointing. Premise is good but after few hours I didn't care much. Most of the side missions are uninteresting and "dating" is a joke (there are like 4 girls you can date which means doing a single quest for them after which you get useful bonus but never see her again).

DLC's are total garbage and waste of time, especially the 2 standalone ones. The only somewhat interesting was the tournament one.

But overall it was fun and entertaining for mindless action game.

So after reading this thread, I played this game for a few hours yesterday.

Is it better than GTA games: combat-wise, yes it is, definitely, but that is because Sleeping Dogs directly stole & copy & pasted the combat from the Batman Arkham games into their Sleeping Dogs game.

Maybe that's not a bad thing, since videos games from different devs/publishers and different IPs steal concepts from each other all the time.

But since GTA devs invent their own own combat (albeit much crappier combat than what Sleeping Dogs has), whereas Sleeping Dogs devs do not, and instead they just directly steal their combat system from one of the most popular & successful combat systems ever (i.e. the Batman Arkham one)...to me it seems a bit disingenuous to praise Sleeping Dogs that much as being vastly better than GTA or other such games.

Maybe it is...but if Sleeping Dogs wasn't standing upon the shoulders of a giant, the games from which it stole its combat system, Batman Arkham, then Sleeping Dogs would be nothing. Sleeping Dogs owes everything to those Batman Arkham devs.

As for the driving in Sleeping Dogs, I found the motorcycle driving to be very clunky, akin to the awful driving play control in Far Cry games.

And also for some reason my character threw his motorcycle helmet onto the ground, and then a few seconds later when I re-mounted my motorcycle, he magically pulled another, second motorcycle helmet out of his back, whilst the first remained on the ground at the same time.

So he hides an unlimited number of motorcycle helmets under his shirt? And his shirt never bulges or has any visible signs that he is concealing any? That was very un-immersive.

The voice-acting seems to be a mixed bag in Sleeping Dogs. I like the main character's VA performance, but a lot of the other VA performances seem to be either mediocre or bad.