Why ‘Sleeping Dogs’ Deserves a Sequel

The history of Sleeping Dogs is no secret: a complicated tale of troubled development, with developers, publishers, and shareholders alike shunting the game around so often that it looked like a game that would never be released. Its origins as a middling installment in the True Crime series leading to an eventual overhaul led by a late Square Enix acquisition makes it a wonder that Sleeping Dogs hit the market at all.

By all accounts, Square Enix was disappointed in the sales of Sleeping Dogs, reporting a massive loss of over $60 million during the latter nine months of 2012 in which it released, totalling 1.5 million copies sold. This is a series that might have debuted to an oversaturated market of open world GTA-clones, but having purchased and played Sleeping Dogs for the first time in 2020, this series would be a breath of fresh air for Square Enix to return to as we approach the next console generation. 

Sleeping Dogs in 2020

I completely missed Sleeping Dogs during its buildup to release and consequently didn’t discover the game until watching a friend stream the game on Twitch earlier this year. It wasn’t altogether abnormal to miss the year’s major releases when I was attending university – which is when Sleeping Dogs released – but the surprising thing is how little word of mouth this game carried. There is clearly still a thriving audience for this game on Twitch, including a helpful and active speedrunning community, and that lasting power is all the more reason for Square Enix to consider revisiting this title – whether as a sequel, prequel, or otherwise. 

Playing this game for the first time in 2020, Sleeping Dogs shows its age as much as it lives up to its ambition. It might unfortunately put some people off from ever giving this game a proper go. Consoles reportedly struggle to support the Definitive Edition’s frame rate, while the PC edition crashes with a surprising degree of regularity. Running the Definitive Edition on a higher end PC at maximum settings, the game isn’t visually impressive in its textures, its draw distances, or its character models. The game can be a mess sometimes, but if you can forgive a game for its technical hitches, then there is truly something special here that deserves to be revisited.

A Mixture of Combat Systems

Sleeping Dogs employs a mixture of gameplay systems that are impressively interlayered, including a heavy focus on driving, hand-to-hand combat, parkour movement, and cover shooting. The driving is perhaps the most criticized element of Sleeping Dogs, for many have described the vehicles as interchangeable bricks with very poor handling and acceleration throughout. In my experience, the driving’s clumsiness is part of its charm, for you eventually unlock the DZS-90 vehicle – which for all intents and purposes is a Batmobile with perfect handling, durability, acceleration, and a charming assortment of weapons. Earning those upper-tier vehicles turned the driving into a satisfying progression system. 

The hand-to-hand melee combat is perhaps the highlight of Sleeping Dogs’ gameplay systems, taking many of the right lessons from the often-compared Batman Arkham series with its freeflow systems and acrobatic implementation of button combos. Sleeping Dogs slowly introduces varied enemy types, including heavy enemies, quick enemies, and enemies who bear an assortment of deadly weapons to cudgel or stab you with.

Ultimately, this combat isn’t immediately gratifying, but it becomes memorable due to the sheer amount of environmental kills that you can inflict upon the gangs of enemies that confront you. Whether slamming someone’s head into a fishtank, forcing someone’s head into an extractor fan, impaling them on the tip of a swordfish, throwing them up into a meat hook, and so forth, the game never fails to offer absurdly gruesome ways to finish off your opponents. It never creeps into the detail and severity of something like Mortal Kombat, but it retains an uncanny sense of dark humor even in these otherwise horrific moments. 

Gunplay and Parkour Mechanics

Midway or later into the game, Sleeping Dogs trades its excellent melee combat for some relatively average cover shooting. Nothing about the game’s gunplay is particularly sloppy when comparing it to peers like the Uncharted series or Spec Ops: The Line, but the shooting lacks the charm and diversity of the hand-to-hand combat. Whereas the melee made me laugh, the shooting made me focus.

The strongest point of Sleeping Dogs’ shooting is the time-slowing mechanic when vaulting over the cover you’ve been shooting behind. In these moments, the game affords a few seconds to quickly clear out a few headshots before sliding into your next cover position. Abusing that mechanic allows for some excellent strategic encounters that can be taken care of with incredible efficiency. 

The parkour mechanics are perhaps the most underbaked gameplay system that Sleeping Dogs builds into its core mission structure. Wei Shen, the game’s protagonist, can vault over a number of surfaces, sprint and make impossible leaps between platforms, and has the speed and agility to match anyone in the city. The game seemingly forgets about this mechanic for long intermittent periods of time between missions, until suddenly you are forced through a scripted-feeling environment that only exists for a particular chase. Unlike Mirror’s Edge, for example, which also tailors its level design to specific linear parkour encounters, Sleeping Dogs only utilizes this mechanic in chase sequences. It denies the player a sense of true explorative agency throughout environments, rendering those chase sequences into badly cloaked QTE sequences. 

A Successful Combination of Gameplay Mechanics

Sleeping Dogs gets none of its interweaving mechanics perfectly right, but it polishes them enough to warrant the need to see this concept revisited in a future reimagining of the same setting and themes. The hand-to-hand combat would be refreshing to revisit in the absence of a new Arkham game, especially with a more varied and intelligent range of AI to contend against throughout the game. The driving could use a little tweaking and iteration on the original game’s mixture of vehicle shooting and jumping. The gunplay could be adjusted to feel tighter and more weighty. And the parkour mechanics could be built more readily into the environments themselves through diegetic features like construction scaffolding and market stalls. Taking these gameplay systems and refining them would perhaps deliver a masterclass iteration of the ludicrously successful Grand Theft Auto V. 

A Compelling Setting and Story

Speaking of the obvious parallels with the beloved, if controversial, Grand Theft Auto series, the standalone feature of Sleeping Dogs that demands another game under this name is the immense commitment to setting. Sleeping Dogs takes place in Hong Kong, a historically contentious city with issues that, at the time of this writing, evoke a far more complicated and compelling battle between police and civilians than are presented in the game.

In Sleeping Dogs, Wei Shen navigates a fine line between undercover officer and committed member of the Triad street gangs he’s sworn to investigate. A sequel could delve into issues of police militarization and brutality, into the question of citizenship and the people’s right to protest their government – topics which are far less cartoony than some of the characters, plotline, and themes presented in Sleeping Dogs. 

Sleeping Dogs’ version of Hong Kong is dynamic and reflective of the three months I spent studying religious philosophy throughout mainland China. From the cramped city shops, lined with crowded sidewalks, mopeds, market stalls, and pork bun shops, Sleeping Dogs always feels like Hong Kong. The blending of Cantonese, Mandarin, and English voice acting as you traverse the dense urban areas evokes a true sense of place that the fictional settings of San Andreas, for instance, never quite achieve. In a market where so many urban settings are explicitly Japanese or American, the focus on contemporary Chinese culture is something that deserves to be explored in even greater detail and nuance in a sequel. 

Criticisms of Sleeping Dogs

Few people idolize the narrative of Sleeping Dog as a magnum opus of storytelling in gaming, nor should they. The characters that the protagonist spends most of his time with are relatively awful people who are vindictive or violent, with little in between. The game veers between intense violence and torture before sending you on a date to a karaoke bar where you attempt to sing classic rock songs in key. For a game that structures nearly every mission with a dichotomy of behaving in favor of the police or the triad gang you’re infiltrating, there is very little in the way of moral consequence within the narrative that Sleeping Dogs presents.

Those criticisms are necessary in order to understand some of the genuinely impactful moments that have stuck with me since playing. One of the most memorable moments in the game involves curating a wedding for one of the more esteemed gang members that you’ve been earning respect and working for. As you retrieve some luxury alcohol from the trunk of the groom’s car, the entire catering staff of the wedding erupts into violence, shooting and killing nearly everyone in attendance – including the bride and groom. As you hobble one of the few surviving family members to safety, Wei shoots his way through waves of the rival gang members that have turned this celebratory occasion into a bloodbath. For some reason, I cared as much about this family during their red wedding as much as Wei did. It’s a testament to the writing and performances that these fundamentally immoral and anti-social human beings evoked empathy in this otherwise tragic moment within the story. 

Moral Dilemmas

Sleeping Dogs carries few moments with as much weight and intensity as the wedding sequence, but when the game hits those notes – particularly as the game progresses – it becomes clear that there is a vast potential to explore these characters and story themes in more mature, developed ways.

Many games like Mass Effect present moral dilemmas in the form of binaries, and Sleeping Dogs attempts something similar through its mission and core gameplay structure, but seldom do those choices and actions carry enough weight for this game to rise above its peers. A sequel that revisited the world of Sleeping Dogs would do well to motivate the player to genuinely question the binary of Wei’s character as an officer or triad member. 

With these considerations for Sleeping Dogs in mind, a future game wouldn’t need to expand the scope of its world, but perhaps its density. It would require a polishing of mechanics rather than a complete overhaul or series of additions. Part of the charm of Sleeping Dogs comes from its sandbox elements, many of which allow for the player to cause unintended physics glitches and laugh-inducing bugs, and I think there might be an ironic risk in polishing the game completely. The most important change for a follow up to Sleeping Dogs would be a deep commitment to its characters and story in a more consistent and powerful manner than its predecessor did. 

What Makes Sleeping Dogs Memorable

I picked up Sleeping Dogs due to a few laughs I shared with some friends at the expense of the game’s notorious pork bun man, whose cheesy sales pitches are memorable in and of themselves. I played the game because I wanted something that felt like a Grand Theft Auto style game and the Chinese city aesthetic evoked nostalgia for my time exploring those urban environments in real life. What I experienced was something akin to a movie-theatre-popcorn game that unintentionally had me laughing at incidental events more than it had me taking its plot seriously – and that’s okay. 

Sleeping Dogs sets the stage for something that could be truly special, beyond the jank and cult following, that could enshrine it as a console defining experience for the next generation of games. It stands above its flaws, and sometimes in spite of them. Unfortunately, United Front Games closed down in October of 2016, with many of its core developers moving onto other projects within the industry. Square Enix still retains the publishing rights for the game, so a faint glimmer of hope remains. But the track record of cancellations with this IP between Triad Wars and Sleeping Dogs 2 suggests that this publisher would rather let sleeping dogs lie. 

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