Your opinion of Square/Enix’s “Sleeping Dogs” is going to be directly related to your opinion of movies about Hong Kong gangland activity.  Those of you who own John Woo box set collections will love it.  Those of you who don’t care if you ever hear the word “triad” again won’t find anything special in this game.

“Sleeping Dogs” was originally intended to be another entry in the “True Crime” series, specifically “True Crime:  Streets of Hong Kong.”  However, Activision chose to cancel the game, and it was picked up by Square/Enix, who retitled it “Sleeping Dogs,” as they did not have the license to title it “True Crime.”

Perhaps it is because of this that everything about “Sleeping Dogs” feels so familiar.

The story is ripped straight out of a mid-‘90s Jet Li film:  You are Wei Shen, a young man who returns to Hong Kong from the U.S. as an undercover police detective determined to bring down the influential Triad society Sun On Yee. 

The gameplay will be instantly familiar to anyone who has played the “Grand Theft Auto,” “True Crime” or “Saints Row” franchises.  It is the standard “drive around on the map from objective to objective” with a few mini-games (such as karaoke) thrown in for distraction.

The chief difference between “Sleeping Dogs” and the other open-world games is “Sleeping Dogs” focus on hand-to-hand combat.  But even this is derivative, and fans of “Batman:  Arkham Asylum” or “Batman:  Arkham City” will master the combat system in short order.

I am a fan of the “Grand Theft Auto” series as well as the Batman series, and I found myself frustrated early in the game by the tutorial system telling me things I already knew. While I understand that using a familiar control scheme can be seen as helpful, for me it added another layer of “seen-it-before” to an already highly unoriginal game.

The Hong Kong setting is rendered gorgeously, but all it really amounts to is a lot of fancy window dressing.  

With a story we’ve all heard a hundred times before and a game we’ve all played a hundred times before, the only people who are really going to find something to love in “Sleeping Dogs” are true Hong Kong cinema enthusiasts.

To quote a famous vampire hunter (Abraham Lincoln), “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”