Been playing Sleeping Dogs for the first time after picking it up for cheap on a GOG sale. I never played it back in the day and never heard much about it, but man, even 13 years later this is a good looking game. I guess I’m giving it a leg up by using DLDSR and RTX HDR, but still. It looks very impressive for its age. I can’t believe this was a PS3 game! The streets are crowded and the city looks great. Though I will say, playing something like this hammers home even more what a marvellous piece of architecture and level design Night City is in Cyberpunk 2077. Hong Kong looks nice and all in Sleeping Dogs, but it doesn’t have near the same character, the same variety and the same distinct but different districts as NC does.

The game has been very enjoyable, though. To a certain extent you might call it slop. And yes, it might not be Disco Elysium or Bioshock or Alan Wake 2, but not every game needs to be. You can’t eat salad every day. Sometimes you need a pizza. And this is a pretty fucking good pizza. It’s got all the trappings of a GTA clone you might expect, with a chinese flavour that adds some kung-fu to the mix and a boilerplate undercover cop story to make the tension tick along and let it at least pretend it’s somewhat different. The pacing has been very snappy so far as well. Almost no downtime, as far as I can tell. After playing some lengthy CRPGs lately that really tested my patience it’s been the perfect antidote - ideal brain-off gameplay, whether racing cars or beating up thugs (or singing karaoke).

I’m only about halfway so far, but from what I’ve seen so far I thoroughly recommend it if you like these kinds of games, especially if you can pick it up at a big discount - it was 80% off recently and at that price it’s a no-brainer.