Review - Sleeping Dogs: Year of the Snake DLC (PS3, 2013)

Released in March, Year of the Snake is the final story DLC for Sleeping Dogs, following October's horror side story Nightmare in North Point and December's Zodiac Tournament. Year of the Snake serves as a follow-up to the story of the main game, showing Wei Shen readjusting to life as a regular Hong Kong police officer. At about two and a half hours long, Year of the Snake is both more entertaining and more varied than the disappointing Nightmare in North Point.

Review - Sleeping Dogs: Nightmare in North Point (PS3, 2012)

Nightmare in North Point is a DLC side story for Sleeping Dogs released for Halloween 2012. It takes the existing game's world, fills it with blue fog, and unleashes living deads all over the place. Between this DLC, Red Dead Redemption's Undead Nightmare, Infamous 2's Festival of Blood, and Yakuza's Dead Souls, "Let's take an existing game world and add monsters to it" has become a bit of a trend. Unfortunately, Nightmare in North Point is a pretty weak adventure plagued equally by an uninteresting script and repetitive gameplay.

Review - Sleeping Dogs (PS3, 2012)

Sleeping Dogs is an open world action game by United Front Games, the team behind Sony's ModNation Racers and Little Big Planet Karting. It was intended to be the third entry in the True Crime franchise before switching around publishers and spending a bit of time in development hell until ultimately being picked up by Square Enix. Like their two racing games, United Front's take on the genre Grand Theft Auto made famous is stylish, charming, but doesn't do anything that really sets it apart from the competition in a major way. As a disclaimer, this isn't my genre of choice. The only Grand Theft Auto games I put any time into were Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City, neither of which held my attention for very long. The only "drive everywhere, cause chaos for everyone" open world game I've ever loved was Pandemic Studios' The Saboteur, which I feel hit every note almost perfectly. With that said, at least Sleeping Dogs kept my attention long enough to want to finish the game, which is more than I can say for most of the genre.