Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition

I just finished *Sleeping Dogs* and damn, what an experience. What I liked most is that the game actually feels like it has a personality. It isn't just another open-world game where you drive somewhere, shoot twenty people, watch a cutscene and repeat. Hong Kong feels like an actual place, the combat is incredibly satisfying, and Wei Shen is a genuinely interesting character because the whole game keeps pulling him between two lives until neither of them really belongs to him anymore. The ending was pretty much what I expected, but I mean that as a compliment. By that point both the police and the triads know what Wei has been doing, and there was never going to be some neat ending where he finishes the mission, gets a medal and goes back to being a normal cop. He has spent too much time with these people, lost too much, and crossed too many lines for that. He survives, but you are left with the feeling that even he doesn't really know what he is supposed to do now. I also love that the game doesn't constantly try to tell you how important or emotional everything is. You just spend enough time with these characters that eventually you care about them, and when things go wrong, it hurts. Then the credits started rolling and I had this funny moment where I was expecting a wall of Chinese names after spending hours completely immersed in Hong Kong, only to see a bunch of American and Canadian names instead. Somehow a studio on the other side of the world managed to make a game with more identity than half the open-world games made today. Maybe I just have good taste, but I would rather play something like this than *John Shooter Reloaded Remastered 2* for the twentieth time. *Sleeping Dogs* isn't perfect, but I don't really care. It has soul. ★★★★★