14 DAY TRIAL // Sleeping Dogs will use a triad of experience streams in order to show the player the various ways to approach a mission and make him care about the background of the main character, Wei Shen.
In addition to the normal experience, which can be used to level up and gain access to new abilities, players will have to deal with Face XP, which represents the fact that the undercover cop needs to maintain of façade of believing to the Triads, and with Police XP, which forces him to try and hard a limited number of bystanders.
The development team at United Front Games have told VG247 during a preview event that, “If you play it properly, you can ace both of those scores for a particular mission. It might be a gunfight on a street, a Heat-style set up like a Michael Mann film. There’s all these pedestrians caught in the crossfire and if you happen to take those people out or any of those people are taken hostage, for example, that would eat into your Police XP score.”
They added, “But if you are careful in that environment, you can get the full cop score. We try to bring a lot of these situations into the game. We have a dynamic hostage mode where enemies can take innocents hostage and bring them round as hostage, and you have a short window where you can take the enemy out or risk damaging the hostage.”
Sleeping Dogs is created using the Hong Kong action movies as a template, and that means both impressive action pieces and a number of ethical dilemmas for the main character, who must always walk the fine line between keeping his cover and his principles at the same time.
Sleeping Dogs will be launched on the PC, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 on August 14 in North America and three days later in Europe.