Recently I finished Sleeping Dogs and its campaign DLCs.
Overall I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. It was fairly dramatic without being melodramatic, funny without descending into brainless parody or teenage bullying (hi GTA), the gameplay itself was generally solid, fun and worked well for this kind of game (albeit fairly unremarkable), and overall it didn't really wear out its welcome despite me pretty much 100-percenting it over about 32 hours. Also, despite a few issues with the controls, the PC version looks very nice and runs quite well - very well-realized version of Hong Kong, with an atmosphere different to Western cities, though it's maybe a bit more static and empty than something like GTA IV's.
Biggest complaints with it are story-related - inconsistency in tone and theme, some aborted plot threads and characters that don't properly finish their arcs (way too much supporting cast around the protagonist that does nothing consequential), and the ending got pretty unbelievable and I found it extremely out of place as far as believability goes, with most of the game being pretty well grounded and the ending turning Wei into a goddamn super-human demigod capable of shrugging off huge amounts of torture and violence.
I also think that the triad vs. cop XP system could have been handled better. At first, I expected the two to routinely come into conflict, with Wei needing to balance his trustworthiness with both factions at the same time, working for one while being careful not to do things that would make the other lose faith in him. Nothing so complex, unfortunately - instead they're just two different XP bars you get for doing completely different things, and there's no situation where you will lose cop XP to get triad XP or anything like that. You could do so much with this - different mission objectives depending on who you want to support, different ways to subdue enemies, etc. but that potential is mostly wasted.
Also, I don't think it's really worth talking about too much, but can we please get rid of bullshit dating mini-games and side-missions that have nothing to do with the plot at all? It's not fun content and the characters are basically meaningless in the story (Wei even says during it he's not in a situation where he'd want a girlfriend, yet he can date four women total, wat?), so why was it even included? Just seems like some bullshit check-box thing that had to be filled to make it "more competitive with GTA IV".
Oh, the DLCs probably aren't worth playing. Nightmare in North Point is kinda funny for about 20 minutes but then runs out of ideas and turns into 3 hours of copy-pasta fights against some slightly different enemies. The end boss battle was such a boring repetitive grind I literally started to wonder if the game had glitched out and was spawning more trash mobs than it was supposed to.
Year of the Snake is a bit better, and it teases different gameplay thanks to Wei now being a "plainclothes" cop, but the story is basically non-existent despite a good setup, and most of the main missions are short and uninteresting. I also ran into some bugs and sloppiness, ranging from enemies spawning in weird spots and running into walls during some of the missions, to the game telling me not to use lethal force even though it was an AI companion that made the kill. The ending is so anti-climactic I actually said "wait, that's it?" out loud.
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