Sleeping Dogs

Hmm didn't realise this was by United Front. Busy busy bees that they are.

So what's the general consensus? Yay or Nay?

Heard nothing but good things. Didn't realise it was out in two weeks.

I should probably finish Saints Row 3 first.

Got it on pre-order on PC from Green Man Gaming for 20 quid (including discounts and Quidco).

I booked August 17th off today.

Guess if I'm looking forward to it or not. ;-)

I'll take that as a yes and as it's you, and it's vaguely GTA ish I reckon that's affirmation enough :)

It was originally going to be True Crime: Hong Kong till the plug was pulled by Activision. I really liked the three-games-in-one idea of the True Crime games, driving/shooting/fighting in an open world. They were broken but the idea was a good one. I've preordered the PC version from Shopto.

Nice to see they've put some effort into the PC version.

Wow, that looks shiny!

Fuppin Awesome!

Take all the best ideas from the genre and mush them together in a stunning environment and you get this. Melee and Gun-play are great, driving is a bit floaty but the action hijack stuff is fucking hilarious.

Chuffed I bought it :D

Is it the same action/hijack that The Wheelman was using? And I'd heard there wasn't much gunplay - which puts me off a little, actually.

Glad this is good, but gonna wait for the lovefilm rental, I think.

Action hijacks are pretty much the same as Wheelman but you have to a be a hell of a lot closer (slightly reduced if you've got the Just Cause 2 Rico suit if it knows you've got a save from that game). You're certainly not hopping from car to car that much.

As for lack of gunplay, you do use guns but not that often and the melee combat (pretty much Arkham's) is so much fun that you don't mind.

Great game and it looks so damn lovely on the PC, even on my now very mid-range PC.

More time spent with the game and it continues to be awesome, thank you Eidos for rescuing this!

Loving this for one really very important reason. The missions are varied. Mixing up the action between being a cop and being a Yakuza means that you get a really excellent varied game spread out across a massive and vibrant gameworld. It's very rare sandbox games get this right, and Sleeping Dogs nails it.

So does this mean there are now two main competitors to GTA? Cool!

Yakuza?! Wrong country!

Why do I have to be at work when I could be playing this? Urgh, just under 17 hours on the clock according to Steam (which monitors entire time the game is running not like most games' played clock) and I'm still enjoying it so much.

There's going to have be something incredible released later in the year to knock this off the top of my GOTY list.

Doh yakuza, what was I thinking. You know what I mean anyway...

Only thing I can think of that might trounce this as sandbox game of the year is the grandaddy of all sandbox games. And if that arrives this side of chrimbo I will eat my liquorice hat.

Demo up for this on Xbox.com now :D

lovely! wanted to try this for a while now, its been getting great word of mouth.

I'm going to run the Xbox demo at the same time as the PC one and compare the two, I wonder if it'll be different? :-P

I've been playing using a 360 controller on my PC, so that'll be the same at least.

Demo is fairly short, the first part is very early in the game, the second is quite a bit further on and only shows you one slice of that mission.

Not all missions have you chasing after someone! I'm a little surprised that there's not even a limited section of the open world to have a look around too.

Anyway the game doesn't actually look too bad at all on the 360, certainly better than I was expecting.

PA Report has a good article on how the PC version was produced.

Too much great word of mouth... I'm in. Shopto here I come.

Well, this is all rather good so far. :)

FAIL. :D

I'm jealous :C

Still, Borderlands 2 soon!

Fuck the game, I want peej's liquorice hat!

It's natty but you'll poo for about a week.

Still playing this, still chipping away at it as there seems so much to do. Was briefly top of the clean driver's list on my friends list for about a day before someone beat me into the tarmac with 4 minutes of clean clean driving. I reckon I could top that. The secret is to pick something really really REALLY slow and head out to the freeways.

The fighting structure pissed me off at first but once you start to unlock some of the school lesson moves, it starts to feel like things gel a little. Not as instantly classic as Arkham Asylum's but still a very good melee combat system, far better than most of the GTAs

The Karaoke bits are a bit...crazy. I'm the king of "Bad Case of Lovin' You" though, fo sho.

Finished the storyline and most of the collectibles last night after 27 hours and it was fantastic fun, really the most enjoyable game I've played this year.

The real secret to the clean driving leaderboard is...... a roundabout. I've managed well over two minutes in normal driving but could have racked up as much as I wanted driving in a circle. I got bored after five minutes.

Finished it too, agreed - definitely one of the highlights of the year so far and quite unexpectedly good considering the series it was spawned from. Maybe I'll have to stop being mean about united front games, that's two crackers they've come up with recently (LittleBigPlanet Karting is similarly surprisingly good all things considered).

I can't get enough of the driving model in this game. Hammering the handbrake to donut and turn on the spot really makes driving enjoyable.

Just got to polish off one more collectable and a couple of drug busts and that'll be me done but mightily impressed by this.

Just about to go dark, internet-wise but before I'm off I'm replaying a bit of The Wheelman and Stranglehold to 'fix' in my mind how much better Sleeping Dogs is than both of these. Still actually quite like the frenzied combat in Stranglehold but oh my, The Wheelman has aged like cheap tesco cheddar. The driving model is atrocious and it's so cheesy.

Sleeping dogs nails the hong kong cinema feel far better than Stranglehold too.

Just started on this. Not really done much of the story so far as I have been mopping up all the health shrines and trying to beat some of your scores on the various challenges the game throws up. The clean driving is a particular favourite past time of mine!

The combat is fluid and very reminiscent of the Arkham games, but there are times I when I just wished you had a gun. Having to take on half a dozen enemies at time in hand-to-hand combat does get a bit tiresome after a while. Still a nice game to play and one which I will try to polish off before GTAV comes out.

Finished the game.

Quite fun, very easy (if you can beat one shooting section, you can beat them all).

I think Jackie's story could have been decent but they didn't quite nail the emotion when it came to his ending.

The ending cinematics in general were a bit "okay let's wrap all this up real quick".

Wei as a main character started to annoy me with how upstanding he was.