10 Awesome Things Sleeping Dogs Does Better Than GTA V

There is no doubt in anyone's mind that GTA V was a monolith of gaming. The record-breaking and critically-acclaimed masterpiece has comfortably succeeded GTA IV's place in the all-time great seventh-generation of games, and will be a testament to what the Xbox 360 and PS3 are capable of years down the line. But as excellent as GTA V is, it isn't perfect and there are other open world games out there that do better in certain areas, such as Sleeping Dogs. Sleeping Dogs is a 2012 game that was originally supposed to be the third game in the True Crime series. After the series was discontinued it was eventually picked up again and repackaged as Sleeping Dogs, a game in which the player must infiltrate the Hong Kong Triad and bring them down internally. This article isn't to suggest that Sleeping Dogs is a superior game, it falls short in a fair few areas, but there are 10 things that it managed to execute in a superior way to GTA V.

10. Less Reliance On Satire

Everyone knows that the Grand Theft Auto franchise exists solely to rip American culture a new one and expose its flaws in an over-the-top and borderline offensive way. The satire in GTA V was superb, but it's almost as if it was too heavily relied on to tell the story, every character existed to lampoon some aspect of American excess, with very little identity of their own. Michael and his loved ones were the dysfunctional family and an ironic take on middle-America, Franklin was poverty and Trevor was a flaw in the system. They never really broke these assigned roles and the story was just unfurled through their interaction with each other and the clear intention of them being a hilarious satire of America. Sleeping Dogs tells its story much more like a true narrative, with less humour and more of an emphasis on loyalty and the consequences of criminality. It felt highly similar to something like Infernal Affairs, a film about undercover Hong Kong cops, the plot very rarely used satire and preferred to use characters with clear goals and ambitions. There was a healthy number of double-crosses, mature development and much more seriousness. GTA V's satire is great, but the plot took a back seat to it one too many times.