Play it on: PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series 360, Xbox One
Current goal: Drag as many enemies as possible into the wall and smash their heads in
There are a lot of great games coming out right now and there are even more promising ones on the horizon, but for some reason my head is stuck in the past. I downloaded all of the seasons of Telltale’s The Walking Dead before bed last night because I remembered I never actually finished the entirety of that story. I made sure Night in the Woods was installed on my PS5 ahead of my annual trip to Possum Springs. And of course, I’ve been playing Destiny 2 every night with some friends to grind for Exotic gear and for a title associated with the shooter’s recent 10th anniversary. But the thing that will probably take up the bulk of my weekend is Sleeping Dogs, an open-world action game from the early 2010s that I never gave a proper shot.
Sleeping Dogs spun out from the True Crime series of action games I played back on the PS2. Initially billed as True Crime: Hong Kong, the project was eventually canceled and revived as Sleeping Dogs under Square Enix. And it was tremendous. I remember thinking at the time that no game I’d played before had successfully made both a satisfying open world and a deep and enjoyable combat system. As Wei Shen, an undercover cop breaking up the triad gangs strangling his hometown, you skirted the line between cop and gangster on a morality system that would unlock different sets of techniques to use in combat. Sleeping Dogs was a bit of a brawler, but unlike, say, the comically overwrought fisticuffs of the Like a Dragon games, scraps in Sleeping Dogs felt more realistic, rough and tumble, and visceral.
It also sports quite the cast. It features actors like Tzi Ma, who appeared as the Chinese commander in Arrival, as well as Tom Wilkinson, who you might’ve seen throughout the 2000s in movies such as The Girl with the Pearl Earring and Batman Begins. The biggest names folks would recognize, though, are Lucy Liu and Emma Stone, who portray a singer and the main character’s love interest, respectively. Come for the gritty crime thriller, stay for the acting chops of this stacked cast, I guess. — Moises Taveras