They're only iffy about you killing pedestrians and even then, it won't give you negative police experience, you just get less of it at the end of the mission. Aand as long as you stick to other criminals, you can go wild as far as the police are concerned. The Triads' sure-fire test for whether you're an undercover cop or not is that undercover cops won't kill, but I'm not sure where they got that impression, 'cause Shen hesitates more about putting up flypaper than killing his fellow man. An aspect that I feel would carry more weight if the police gave any degree of shit. So the thrust of the concept is that you have one cop experience bar and one crim experience bar which offer different upgrades, a gameplay mechanic intended to illustrate the fact that Shen is torn between two loyalties. And in the grand tradition of undercover cop crime stories, every high-level criminal implicitly trusts this new bloke without any verifiable background over all their established henchmen because he's smarter and better with a gun, almost as if he's been to some kind of, say, police academy. The recreated real world city is Hong Kong and the petty crim footstool that dreams of the stars is Wei Shen, a Chinese-American recently returned from the States to sign up with the Triads, because who the fuck else are you going to sign up with in Hong Kong, the Real IRA? But get ready to un-bunch your pants because here comes the twist: Wei is actually an undercover police officer, which would come as more of a surprise if it weren't the plot of the previous two True Crime games.
#3 SLEEPING DOGS IMAGE SERIES#
Bonus points are offered if the game's set in some recreation of a real-world contemporary city, and if the plot throws up some moral message that all the luxury and fine living in the world will never quell the guilt from all the murdering you've been doing for it, which rings a bit misdirected while I'm ploughing through pedestrian precincts in a riding mower.įittingly, Sleeping Dogs was originally of the slightly-laughably-named True Crime series – the original Grand Theft Auto clone! – except there was a developer switch and they had to come up with a new title that somehow makes even less sense although there's a racist joke about East Asian cuisine in there somewhere that you'll be pleased to hear I'm not going to acknowledge. There have been enough games where you are allowed to get bored, run down the street and start taping passers-by to trolley cars that sandbox games are officially a genre, but when a sandbox game is about a petty crim starting off in the slum district, being used as a footstool by the local underworld's middle management, doing mostly vehicle-related favours for increasingly important contacts until they can work their way up to wealth and success while knocking over enough lamp posts to illuminate Oprah Winfrey's inner thighs then the term " Grand Theft Auto clone" seems perfectly adequate, while "petty-crim-footstool-vehicle-related-inner-thighs-'em-up" istoo awkward to say. I'm thinking I might have been a little hasty when I declared that the term " Grand Theft Auto clone" was redundant. This week, Zero Punctuation reviews Sleeping Dogs.