When comparing Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition vs NieR: Automata, the Slant community recommends NieR: Automata for most people. In the question“What are the best games on Steam with a rich story?” NieR: Automata is ranked 11th while Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition is ranked 81st. The most important reason people chose NieR: Automata is:
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Great story that deals with plenty of gray moral issues
The story in Sleeping Dogs is done well, touching on some very human issues. Playing as Wei Shen, an undercover cop, you pretend to join certain gangs in Hong Kong in order to spy on their operations. You're technically not supposed to care about the members of the gangs, but Wei ends up growing close to them, genuinely wanting to help them and be a part of their lives. This conflicts with his role as a police officer, causing him to play both sides while he figures out his priorities and who he's really loyal to. It's an intriguing dynamic that lets you get into Wei's head and his emotions.
Pro Well-implemented hand-to-hand combat with cool environmental finishing moves
The hand-to-hand fighting system is rock-solid with some neat finishers you can pull off. Punches and kicks are snappy and responsive, with a good amount of weight behind your button presses to really make you feel involved in every fight. You can grab opponents and maneuver them however you want, mainly with guiding them over to the nearest shutter cage, window, the edge of a rooftop on a high building, and so on.
Finishing your enemies off with these environmental finishers is tons of fun: you can throw them off a building, ram their head into glass, or slam down a shutter over their heads. It's a brutal spectacle that makes the combat here stand out from other games.
Pro Really good open world set in Hong Kong
The open world setting is great. Modern-day Hong Kong is pretty unique for a video game, and thankfully it's a true-to-life recreation of what the metropolis looks like. There's a perfect mix of traditional temples, for example, with taller, Western-style glass buildings that you'd find downtown. You can go just about anywhere, whether it's on foot or taking a car for a spin down the roads and highways, with plenty of side quests and mini-objectives to find and complete. It's a good-looking world that's designed well and filled with a good amount of content.
Pro The Definitive Edition has all of the DLC included in one package
Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition comes with everything added to the original game. This is pretty good for new players who have yet to experience Sleeping Dogs at all, or maybe for someone who played the original game years ago and didn't want to buy the DLC.
Pro Fast-paced, action-packed combat
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Pro Unique storytelling with a real emotional impact
NieR: Automata's outlook on storytelling is incredibly special. To get the full experience, you have to run multiple playthroughs of the game, each of which offers a new experience and perspective. Your world view of the story events and characters expands drastically as you complete each playthrough, playing on your expectations to help you develop a deeper emotional bond with the protagonists and become invested in their plight.
Things take a real turn on your third playthrough, putting you on an emotional roller coaster all the way to the true ending. The plot twists and knocks on the fourth wall elevate the story to a truly unique place. Getting all the way to the very end can be a religious experience from how much heart and meaning you discover in the symbolism.
Pro It's got a hauntingly beautiful environment
NieR: Automata is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape after Earth has been overrun by hostile machines, and the artists really nailed what that would feel like. Abandoned and overgrown cities litter the landscape along with old refineries, graveyards, and eerie forests. When you add the beautiful soundtrack to the experience, it fills you with a bittersweet mix of loneliness and hope.
Pro Varied genre-spanning gameplay elements
NieR: Automata has different types of gameplay to keep things interesting. From the very start, you're on an on-rails bullet hell section, and then you switch over to the more traditional action RPG style of fast-paced combat. Things change up again not long after with some side-scrolling platforming from a 2D view. Later on in the story, there's a hacking mini-game where you navigate a tiny ship through a short puzzle, with the music changing to a charming retro sound to fit the theme and mood. This is a game that doesn't stay boxed in a single genre.
Pro An incredible amount of content
Outside of the main story, there's plenty of optional content to dive into. The side quests are the best way to get to know the characters and lore of the world, with some of them giving clever and subtle foreshadowing of the game's most critical events. There are also weapons to collect and upgrade, each of which offer nice little tidbits of lore after you get them to max level. And after reaching a certain point in the story, you get access to Chapter Select that lets you go back and replay whatever you want. You can easily spend 60+ hours exploring the world and still have much more to do.
Pro Gorgeous, ethereal soundtrack with amazing vocals
NieR: Automata's music is out of this world. It's so stunning and elegant in a way that nothing else can really live up to. The soundtrack manages to emotionalize the game through music, from the action-packed tracks with hard-hitting wind instruments and percussion, to the softer, somber songs that encapsulate the hauntingly beautiful environments and story moments you encounter. Vocals in the lore's indescribable language makes the music even more memorable, adding to the ethereal quality of the sound. This soundtrack is definitely one that you can go back to again and again without getting sick of it.
Cons
Con Feels too similar to other sandbox open world games
If you've played a bunch of other open world games in a modern city, then Sleeping Dogs will probably feel too familiar to you. This is fine if you really enjoy these types of games and you're looking for something similar. For anyone else who wants something fresh from the genre, the samey gameplay mechanics, tons of icons dotting the map, and mission structures may end up boring you instead. If you're feeling burnt out from these types of games, you may want to steer clear of this one.
Con Unpolished
There are a lot of strange quirks about the game that make it feel and look janky. Controls aren't particularly seamless, with Wei's walking and running animations looking off, and driving animations feeling too loose and unrealistic. Even with the polished graphics for the Definitive Edition, they still look low-effort and low-budget, a lot like the rest of the game. One thing here and there isn't too bad, but adding them all up, they can end up as a bunch of distractions.
Con Not worth it if you already played the original Sleeping Dogs
Aside from the added DLC, there isn't much of an incentive to pick this up if you played the regular Sleeping Dogs. The graphical upgrades are okay, but might not be worth shelling out the extra money.
Con Limited open world
Even though NieR: Automata is technically an open world game, it doesn't always feel like it. It's more that there's a big open space in the center of the ruined city you explore, with branches that lead off to vastly different environments, like a desert, a village, and a few other places. These locations aren't that spacious, either, and it's a bit of a stretch to even imagine all of these places being so close together in the first place. It's not too much of an issue as long as you find the story and combat engaging enough.
Con Second playthrough can get repetitive
Once you get to Route B, your second playthrough, you may find that too much is the same. There are some big differences, such as the new way you get to see things play out, but a lot of it rehashes Route A, your first playthrough. There's a ton of hacking you have to do as well, which gets pretty boring after repeating it over and over again. But if you stick with it, Route C and onward are absolutely worth the time spent getting to that point.
Con Some boring fetch quests
The pacing gets messed up when you're forced to run certain fetch quests near the start of the game. This is somewhat forgivable after the fun and action-packed introductory level, but the quests themselves are still a drag to play through. Some of the side quests can also boil down to the same thing. Even though these quests give a lot of useful information about the world, they're not all that fulfilling, and you may dread having to repeat them when playing through the game again.
Con Buggy on PC
Some players complain about the game crashing, freezing, their save files mysteriously disappearing, and more. As of June 2018, over a year after the game's initial release, there is still no patch to fix these problems. Not everyone on PC will have these bugs, but it's still quite prevalent. If you continually run into issues, your best bet is to find a mod or play the console versions instead of waiting on an official patch that may never happen.