10 Best New Video Game Franchises Of The Decade (So Far)

3. Sleeping Dogs

sleeping dogs
United Front Games

If you're a fan of Hong Kong cinema, you simply have to check out Sleeping Dogs.

Inspired by classic crime thrillers like Hardboiled and Infernal Affairs, United Front's open world crime shooter showed just how good GTA could be if it had the guts to switch up it's Anglo-centric setting. It had a fantastic combination of driving, shooting, and punching, with the environmental aspect of hand to hand combat showcasing some particularly gruesome animations too.

It's a shame we're yet to get a sequel, especially since United Front decided to work on an MMO spin-off instead. That got cancelled last year, so here's hoping they've recalculated their efforts and are now hard at work making a true successor to their 2012 hit.

Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.