TIME EXTEND

Beyond the flaws, a vision of Hong Kong unlike any other

BY ALAN WEN

Developer United Front Games

Publisher Square Enix

Format 360, PC, PS3, PS4, 360, Xbox One

Release 2012

Your very first mission as undercover cop Wei Shen involves extorting protection money from the vendors at the local street market – the first of whom, you’re told, happens to sell pirate DVDs. The image of a Chinese person hawking counterfeit goods is a well-worn stereotype, but one that has some truth to it, particularly in the city that Sleeping Dogs calls home. In Hong Kong, in the years before platform holders officially set up shop in the territory, pirated game software – such as Game Boy cartridges packed with a dubious number of games – commonly sat alongside imported stock, and what little there existed of licensed Chinese distributions. There’s some karma there, perhaps, in the fact that many depictions of the former British colony in games and movies also have the uncanny remove of a counterfeit product.

Hong Kong’s neon cityscape is frequently used as an orientalist inspiration for the cyberpunk genre, while the long-demolished Kowloon Walled City, with its reputation as a densely packed den of criminality, provided the perfect setting for Shenmue II and Stranglehold. More recently, Stray straddled both tropes so thoroughly that the cat simulator was originally known as ‘Project HK’. As with all of these examples, developer United Front wasn’t based in China – but it’s to the studio’s credit that it made an all-too-rare attempt at recreating Hong Kong in its contemporary state.

The game was originally developed with the backing of Activision, which planned to incorporate it into its ailing True Crime series. After that project was cancelled, it was picked up by Square Enix and repackaged as an original IP. This might be just as well since, unlike those games, which boasted GPS street-accurate recreations of LA and New York, the open-world version of Hong Kong on offer here takes significantly more artistic licence. It’s a distinction made clear by the fact that the Special Administrative Region’s flag has an orchid with six petals, rather than the five seen on the real thing.