10 Best GTA Games That Aren't GTA Games

8. Sleeping Dogs

Sleeping Dogs
Square Enix

Released during a time when gamers were growing bored of visiting the same handful of North American cities time and again, Sleeping Dogs, like Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed, championed an altogether different culture and setting to let players loose in. 

Indeed, protagonist Wei Shen's trials and tribulations as an undercover cop in the former largely take a backseat to the world around him, itself presented in painstakingly realistic detail. Modern-day Hong Kong represented something of an alien playground for long-time action-adventure fans, just as AC1's Holy Land had before it. This is a not-insignificant achievement for United Front Games, which only had the obscure ModNation Racers under its belt before joining up with Square-Enix to deliver Sleeping Dogs.

That's not to say Shen's story is throwaway by any means. Sleeping Dogs was quite rightly lauded for its authentic voice acting and characterization, but it's the setting, together with thoroughly enjoyable combat and progression systems that make one of the 2010s' biggest surprise hits one worth returning to again and again.

Contributor
Contributor

Joe is a freelance games journalist who, while not spending every waking minute selling himself to websites around the world, spends his free time writing. Most of it makes no sense, but when it does, he treats each article as if it were his Magnum Opus - with varying results.