Sleeping Dogs
Intense overall intensityWhat's in it
The player fights human enemies hand-to-hand and with firearms, drawing blood, and can trigger brutal environmental kills that impale or crush opponents in gory detail.
The player drinks alcohol during dating and drinking sequences, and the triad drug trade drives missions the player takes part in.
A story mission depicts the interrogation and torture of a captured character on screen.
Dialogue carries frequent strong profanity, including 'fuck'.
The undercover plot depicts betrayal, on-screen murder of named characters, and grim triad cruelty.
As an undercover operative the player commits assault, theft, and illegal street racing as ordinary play.
Dating side-missions and nightlife scenes feature romance and crude sexual banter; no sexual acts are shown on screen.
In-game gambling is available where the player wagers in-game money that cannot be cashed out.
Revealing outfits appear on club patrons and beachgoers, with no direct exposure.
The open-world nightlife includes massage parlors staffed by workers in revealing attire, alluding to sex work without depicting it.
Who can reach your kid
What it is
Sleeping Dogs is an open-world action-adventure set in a recreated Hong Kong, where you play Wei Shen, a police officer working undercover inside a Triad organization. Play centers on hand-to-hand martial-arts combat with grapples, counters and brutal environmental finishers (impaling enemies or shoving them into machinery), alongside gunfights that draw blood, car and motorcycle chases, and free-roaming crime and police activities. The game carries strong profanity throughout, heavy alcohol and drug content tied to the Triad drug trade, dating side-missions with romance and crude sexual banter, revealing nightlife and massage-parlor attire, and a graphic torture scene in the story. It is single-player with no online interaction or purchases.
How it's framed
The game frames Wei as an officer whose cover requires committing the crimes he is meant to stop, and the divided loyalty between cop and gangster is its central tension. Its systems reflect this directly: Police XP is earned by minimizing civilian casualties and property damage, while Triad XP rewards violent, complex melee kills, so the two identities pull against each other. Violence and criminality are presented as the texture of the undercover world rather than celebrated.
Details
- Developer
- United Front Games
- Publisher
- Square Enix
- Released
- 2012
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