By the time it became established as a proverb its meaning had 'leave well alone', or as we might have it in the 21st century, "if it ain't broke don't fix it". The expression may have started as a warning about the risk of waking a potentially dangerous animal, but it later turned metaphorical. "It is nought good a slepyng hound to wake." Geoffrey Chaucer was one of the first to put this notion into print, in Troilus and Criseyde, circa 1380, although the belief itself may well be much older: 'Let sleeping dogs lie' derives from the long-standing observation that dogs are often unpredictable when they are suddenly disturbed.
What's the origin of the phrase 'Let sleeping dogs lie'?
The end result still doesn’t have the personality or verve of Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption, the novelty of Assassin’s Creed, or the crazy acrobatics of Just Cause but it’s a better action game than any of them. (Except for the unremarkable graphics, which do betray the game’s long and difficult development.) Those are harsh words and demonstrably untrue, for even though the game does almost nothing new almost all its individual components are certainly near or at the top of the genre. But as you might know the game started life as True Crime: Hong Kong, before Activision gave up on it and the project was bought out by Square Enix.Īt the time Activision’s rationale was that it was ‘not good enough’ and that it was not going to be ‘a title at, or near, the top of the competitive open world genre’. We’ve purposefully gone this far into the review without mentioning Sleeping Dogs’ complicated life cycle, because we don’t think it fair that that it should overshadow the game itself.
Some of the side missions are very good though, with the girlfriend courtship in particular working much better than Grand Theft Auto IV. The story only lasts around 14 hours, which is short by genre standards, so it’s a shame that even some of that is just filler. The game isn’t always successful in how it set-ups its mission though and in trying to get away from the Grand Theft Auto formula of drive-somewhere-and-kill-someone, there’s one too many on-foot chases through back alleys and some dull detective missions where you’re trying to triangulate mobile phones or tail suspects. It also helps make a gunfight that much more of an event when it does break out. Not only is this more realistic (apparently guns are relatively rare in Hong Kong, with Triads preferring a meat cleaver to a machinegun), but it’s also more authentic to Hong Kong cinema. It’s also interesting how gunplay is less common than hand-to-hand fighting. But at times the Hong Kong setting can only do so much to stave off the déjà vu.Īnd yet it’s inarguable that each of these individual gameplay elements are superior to Grand Theft Auto, and at least equal to Saints Row. Many of the team worked at Need For Speed developer Black Box and Max Payne 3 maker Rockstar Vancouver, for example. In most cases there’s still a direct relationship between these other games and Sleeping Dogs developer United Front Games. The combat works well and almost all the other action elements bear similarly close comparison to existing games, from the Max Payne style gunplay, to the Need For Speed-esque races, and on-foot chase sequences reminiscent of Assassin’s Creed. Few will really care about that though and the use of environmental objects for finishing moves, such as slamming Triad faces into rotating fans or shunting them off railings, is used even more than in Batman. This means a focus on fairly generic street fighting, rather than specific martial arts – although there are identifiable karate and other moves in there. It’s not exactly the same system in Sleeping Dogs – Shen’s acrobatics are more realistically constrained than the Dark Knight’s – but the counter-based fundamentals and large crowds of thugs are very similar. It’s now largely forgotten that Eidos Interactive co-published Arkham Asylum, but when Square Enix bought Eidos they also got the expertise of the London studio that had worked with Rocksteady on the Batman games.
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