cjmelendez_
Sleeping Dogs is one of my favorite games this year. While it does not exactly reinvent the open-world crime genre, it adds a much needed layer of polish on the shooting and fighting mechanics—it’s a third person shooter and brawler game set in a sandbox Hong Kong.
In similar fashion to Rockstar with Red Dead Redemption, United Front Games opted to create a supernatural DLC campaign in order to spice things up. “Nightmare in Northpoint” takes place in during an unspecific point in the game’s main campaign. While on a date with Not Ping, one of Wei Shen’s many girlfriends, an ex-triad named Big Scar Wu, or Smiley Cat as his peers call him much to his displeasure, escapes the underworld to exact revenge on the Sun On Yee, the triad group that Wei Shen is undercover in. The chase begins as Smiley Cat focuses his revenge on Wei Shen by kidnapping Not Ping.
Bestowed with powers via a magical Chinese tea, Wei Shen must fight Smiley Cat’s undead army, the Jiang Shi: a Chinese vampire-zombie-ghost-thing. The Jiang Shi are undead warriors that require Wei’s new-found abilities to be defeated. While Wei’s new skills are great to look at, fighting the Jiang Shi can become quite tedious; they require extra beating followed by a grab, in order to finish them off.
Along with the Jiang Shi, Wei Shen must also defend against and banish possessed citizens and Yaoguai. Yaoguai are strong demons that can only be damaged once Wei’s Face meter, now magic meter, is full and his body glows blue. Peachwood Swords also come into play as they are the best tools to kill these otherworldly apparitions. While these new combat additions are awesome, it’s very disappointing seeing none of them carry over into the main game as a fun unlockable.
Gateways to the underworld will release limitless Jiang Shi unless Wei closes them by literally sending his foes back through. While the concept of fighting these ghosts is pretty fun, and is fun to do at first, it can get a little tiresome–not to mention there being a bit of an issue countering their attacks completely.
A fault that accentuates the combat against the Jiang Shi is the fact that mission variety is pretty thin. Many, if not all, missions end up with the player being forced to fight wave after wave of Jiang Shi. Whether it be killing all of them, closing a gateway in order to be able to kill them all, or having to build up your magic meter in order to defeat a Yaogui. It get repetitive very quickly.
“Nightmare in Northpoint” is a humorous campaign that falls short of expectation, but at $7 it’s hard to complain. I’d have been much more satisfied if the content was $15-$20 and fully fleshed out as a lengthy campaign with a lot of extras. It took about 2-3 hours to complete the story and about an hour more to finish all of the remaining challenges and find all of the Hell Money shrines. “Nightmare in Northpoint” provides a short but sweet reason to jump back into the now haunted streets of Hong Kong.
(7.5 / 10)
Good
(7.5 / 10)
