Games
Playstation & PC Gamers, Get One of the Best Open-World Action Games for Less Than R100
This week’s Deal of the Week is an underappreciated open-world action gem you need to play.
We can’t recommend the under-appreciated open-world crime game, Sleeping Dogs, enough, and the fact that the remastered version is going for less than R100 makes it a no-brainer.
This action gem from 2012 was originally developed by United Front Games before receiving an upgrade in the form of the Definitive Edition. Interestingly, the game was supposed to be True Crime: Hong Kong (a follow-up to the True Crime games during the PS2 era), before morphing into Sleeping Dogs.
It is currently priced at R85.35 on the Playstation Store (literally less than some of the more exotic coffee orders at Starbucks) and Steam (even cheaper, for R39.90). Of course, it’s also on Xbox, and still worth the prices currently listed. But what makes Sleeping Dogs so great?
The game’s story follows Wei Shen, an undercover Chinese-American police officer on assignment to infiltrate the Sun On Yee Triad organisation. Much like a faster, kung-fu-injected Grand Theft Auto, gameplay centres on Shen’s fighting, shooting and parkour abilities, and on gadgets that can be used for combat and exploration.
Sleeping Dogs‘ gameplay variety really is a standout. You’ll go from an on-foot chase sequence through a market to a car-chase, to shooting out the window, before crashing into the bad guys’ hideout and beating the hell out of them in some slick Arkham-style hand-to-hand combat.
On top of that, the story itself is excellent and reminiscent of the Hard Boiled, dirty-cop style crime tales that made people fall in love with the genre in the first place. The voice acting is top-notch and each cut-scene pushes the narrative along well.
As for the additions the Definitive Edition brings, it was reworked, rebuilt and remastered for consoles and PC in 2014. All 24 previously available DLC extensions have been integrated into the game, including the story-extending episode Year of the Snake and the horror-themed Nightmare in North Point. Alongside a wealth of new technological, audio and visual improvements, Hong Kong has never felt so alive.
If you’ve never played Sleeping Dogs, now is a better time than ever. Trust me.
