Sleeping Dogs
One of the things Sleeping Dogs does very right is having a shitton of side activities to do. They all require some story progress to unlock, of course, but between the collectibles and street races and hacking mini-games and girlfriends - not to mention simple statistical challenges, like jump distance and max-speed driving time - there's no shortage of things to do between Triad and Police missions. Unfortunately they're not all winners (the Drug Bust activites, for instance, are pretty bland), but Sleeping Dogs satisfies the crucial requirement of keeping the player busy with plenty of variety.
The story is, well, it's better than most GTA imitators but still not as solid as GTA 4. The plot of an undercover cop gradually infiltrating the Triads is promising, and in general the characters and storytelling sell it impressively. But it seems like whenever the story needs to make real progress, it comes with a jarring twist, sometimes feeling like a planned scene was deleted. The voice acting is generally good, and the actor for lead character Wei Shen is particularly excellent; but facial and gesture animations during story scenes seem jerky, and distinctly behind-the-times in terms of motion-capture.
Gameplay-wise, the driving is perfectly adequate, but the routes between Hong Kong's major districts are too long and sparse. Shooting is loose, but happens only very rarely. The real feather in Sleeping Dogs' gameplay-cap is the hand-to-hand combat, which is leagues ahead of most open-world games, ... but still imperfect. The basic controls are very simple, and fights generally revolve around quick hits, knock-out kicks, and counterattacks -- so it's impossible to avoid comparison with Batman: Arkham City. But where Batman is always able to divert attention to dodges and counters as necessary, Wei Shen just doesn't feel as responsive, and can get blindsided quite a bit in hectic encounters. And if he presses the counter button at the wrong time, he'll stand around like an idiot for a full second or so, just waiting to get hit.
I have to call special attention to the technical solidarity of Sleeping Dogs, which is surprisingly good. All too often, modern games are made with consoles in mind, leaving a PC version to a rushed and/or third-party port -- but Sleeping Dogs feels like it was made for the PC (provided you have a controller with analog inputs). Performance is great, the menus are responsive and functional, and the day-one DLC texture pack makes everything look fantastic. Actually, the game kind of looks like shit without it.
Sleeping Dogs is full of pretty-good mechanics and pretty-good world building. The shortfalls in combat and storytelling keep it from really rivalling Rockstar, but aren't bad enough to keep the game's impressive variety down. And hey, maybe I'll be blown away once I get to more John Woo firefights and high-speed hijackings.
Progress: Cop level 3, Triad level 2, Face level 3