Driving around the city gives me geographical phantom limb tingles, especially since Kowloon is the traditional Triad stronghold. Carving off territory was probably a wise way to limit the scope, but to anyone who’s visited or lived in Hong Kong, the city feels incomplete. The game only depicts Hong Kong Island, excluding Kowloon, the New Territories, and all but one island – meaning the playable area covers about 7% of actual Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s known for being the most densely-populated city on Earth, but Sleeping Dogs cranks it to eleven. And yes, the city really does have an obscene number of supercars.īut pulling up a map breaks the illusion. There aren’t enough people there, but that’s forgivable – a game engine couldn’t handle Hong Kong crowds today, much less in 2012. A few colonial structures like the old Central Police Station and Legislative Council Building are roughly where they should be. Travel uphill and you’ll find the nightclubs of Soho, Lan Kwai Fong, and the Central-Mid-Levels Escalator. Skyline markers like Bank of China Tower and the HSBC building have close-enough cousins in the Central district. The Aberdeen Promenade is there, as is the gorgeous neon monstrosity of Jumbo Floating Restaurant. Once the map opened up, I spent hours cruising the city, trying to find out if my favorite buildings made the cut. There are enough landmark clones to inspire comparison videos and location hunting. Shen’s first tiny apartment embodies the old-style Hong Kong public housing studios. Stroll into a night market and you’ll hear hawkers selling their goods. Pedestrians converse in Cantonese and, in a particularly deft touch, the crosswalk lights make the correct ClickClickClickClickClick noise. Neon and billboards blaze on the buildings overhead. Red taxis and green-roofed minibuses roar by. The city looks and sounds like it should. Sleeping Dogs feels most authentic when you’re walking down the street. The city is strange, wrong, a fiction – but it’s still undeniably Hong Kong. Its outdoor areas feel squeezed while its indoor environments expand to ludicrous dimensions. It’s recognizable at street level, but falls apart the moment the player calls up the map or looks out to sea. Sleeping Dogs provides a schizophrenic vision of Hong Kong. So how accurate is the Hong Kong we get in Sleeping Dogs?Įxtremely accurate, it turns out, and at the same time, not accurate at all. But with Sleeping Dogs: The Definitive Edition launching recently and the release schedule finally cooling off, I thought it was time to revisit and see how the game measured up to reality. Real life crowded the game out and I shelved the idea. I bought Sleeping Dogs 72 hours after moving to Hong Kong, thinking I’d explore the city digitally at the same time as encountering it with my own eyes.

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