In my last blog entry (from nearly a month ago) I mentioned that I had started the game Sleeping Dogs. On this game I was playing at a far more relaxed pace. Such a relaxed pace that I hadn’t even downloaded the game onto my main PC. Forza Horizon 6 had just come out, NBA 2K went on steep discount, and Battlefield was whispering my name like the Green Goblin mask. All of this, however, paled in comparison to the fact that I had been obsessed with my PlayStation 5. On a spring break trip with friends I managed to snag a copy of Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which included a digital code for Spider-Man Remastered. For a week or two my routine looked like this: play Spider-Man on the PS5 when I was at home by myself, and play Sleeping Dogs on my Steam Deck whenever I was away from home or when the family TV was otherwise occupied. This ultimately culminated in me finishing both games within an hour of eachother. This article documents my experience with both of these games.
Sleeping Dogs
I initially added this game to my backlog list on a whim, but I ended up being incredibly enthralled with the game’s storytelling, combat, and open world. The game follows the protagonist Wei Shen, an undercover cop whose directive is to infiltrate the ranks of the Hong Kong gang Sun On Yee. Unsurprisingly, Wei ends up falling in love with the gang, building genuine connections and relationships within the syndicate. This story is fairly on-the-nose, but it does an excellent job spending time with the diverse characters, making each one feel like a fleshed-out individual. I don’t want to expand much more for fear of spoiling the story, but I would fully recommend experiencing it for yourself.
The combat is nothing short of excellent. It has a heavy emphasis on hand-to-hand and melee combat, with Wei learning different attacks and combos as the game progresses. There are guns sprinkled throughout the game, but they make up far less of the game’s combat than in many open-world titles. Most of the combat consists of punching bad guys, intercepting their attacks by hitting a dodge button at the right time, and grappling them into brutal finisher moves. It feels a bit clunky at the start, but once I racked up a few hours the combat felt brutal yet elegant. I would describe it as playing very similar to games like Batman: Arkham Knight, although the animations and nuances make it feel completely original.
The open world is not quite on the level of games like Cyberpunk or Skyrim, but it does do a great job being immersive, diverse, and interesting. The map itself is well-made, with content being spread out fairly uniformly across the relatively small nine-square-kilometer area. The driving is nothing special, but there are plenty of interesting cars to drive around the map. Out of the reasons you should play this game, I would put the open world design in an easy third place.
I don’t have much to say about this game, but I will end by stating that I really enjoyed it. Stepping into the mean streets of Hong Kong was a truly engaging experience, and while I don’t see myself frequently revisiting this game, was something that I truly enjoyed.
Spider-Man: Remastered
If you’re a longtime reader of my blog (statistically you almost certainly are not), you’re probably a little confused. There have been zero mentions of this game in my backlog at any point. The reason for this is that this game simply came out of nowhere for me. As I mentioned before, I picked this one up and started playing it quite spontaneously. For a few months I’ve been playing off and on, but for the past week or so I’ve been working harder and harder to beat this one. While it didn’t earn a spot on my backlog, it did hold my attention long enough for me to beat it. This is exactly the type of thing I would love for this backlog to make me good at. The ability to sit down and play through a single game before getting distracted is something I would love to cultivate in myself.
Anyway, you’re probably curious about my impressions on the game itself. I have much less here than I did on Sleeping Dogs, but I can give a brief paragraph summarizing my opinions on the game.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this game. The open world is ludicrously fun to traverse, the story is everything I would expect from a superhero game, and the combat is entirely serviceable. The overall presentation in terms of graphics, voice acting, and game design was incredibly polished. While I don’t have much to say about this game since I wasn’t playing with this blog in mind, I would absolutely recommend it to fans of Spider-Man and fans of open world games alike.
What’s Next?
Sleeping Dogs took me about 12 hours to beat, a good bit shorter than HowLongToBeat’s 15 hour estimate. I did enjoy this game and I felt like I got to experience a good amount of main and side content.
Spider-Man was just as fun. PlayStation’s time tracking is spotty at best, but I would estimate myself to have spent between 15 and 20 hours playing. This is fairly inline with HowLongToBeat estimates.
The next game on my backlog is Black Mesa, I’ve already progressed quite a bit into the campaign, although my upcoming time out of town may leave me with little time to advance. Stay tuned for an update.
You can view the full backlog as well as the reason for each game being on the list here.
Full List. Includes name, progress (if applicable), and estimated hours to complete.
- Black Mesa: 6/15 Hours
- Half-Life 2: 13 hours
- Elden Ring: 19/60 hours (optimistically)
- Fallout 3: 10/22 hours
- Red Dead Redemption 2: 50 hours
- System Shock: 2/17 hours
- Callisto Protocol: 10 hours
Sleeping DogsDone!- Armored Core VI: 17.5 Hours
- Control: 2/11 hours
- Remnant 2: 18 hours
- Robocop: Rogue City: 12 hours
- Metal Eden: 8 hours
- Armored Core 3: Portable: 4/12 hours.