

This is in addition to holding down a run button to effectively chase one's foe. In Sleeping Dogs, when coming up on a scalable surface, the player has to rapidly tap the jump button. He'll figure it out and scale walls, vault barriers, and otherwise make life easy for you while still being interesting to watch. Hold the run button and point your avatar in the correct direction.


In a free-running game, such as Assassin's Creed, most climbing and leaping is fairly automatic. On sight, though, he runs away, and the game's awkward parkour elements immediately come into play. He sends you, with your investigative prowess, to track down his target and talk to him. The main character, Wei Shen, is an undercover cop currently doing dirty work for a ne'er-do-well who has it out for another unscrupulous individual. It begins with a conversation in the back of a Chinese restaurant. If this is the best element of Sleeping Dogs, the game is in trouble. They will generally specially construct a demo out of what they feel best represents a game. It's worth noting, though, that a gaming company's desire during E3 is to give off the best possible impression of its software. After all, the demo only demonstrated one element of the title's gameplay-the melee combat-which has been mostly absent in the game's trailers. Perhaps, though, this is an inaccurate picture of the game.

It simply doesn't have the level of polish or playability one would expect of a title that's spent so long in development. If the playable demo at Square Enix's booth was any indication, though, Sleeping Dogs should probably sit in development for another six months or so before it hits shelves. Dropped by its previous publisher, the game was picked up by Square Enix earlier this year and, in mid-August, should be brought to completion. Back in the days when it was being developed under the auspices of Activision, the game was known as True Crime: Hong Kong (and before that, Black Lotus. Sleeping Dogs wasn't always called Sleeping Dogs.
