Sleeping Dogs is the latest in a long line of open-world crime games, and it’s the spiritual successor to the True Crime franchise. It’s not particularly difficult or original, but if you want to overpower protagonist Wei Shin early on, our GamesBeat guide will show you how.
First, progress the story just enough to unlock Tiffany, Amanda, and the carjacking jobs in your phone. It only takes a couple of story missions to get to this point. Now you can go on a couple of quick dates to unlock key collectibles on your minimap. This means that whenever you’re doing something and you get within proximity to a health shrine or jade statue, you’ll be alerted to its presence.
Health Shrines appear on your minimap
Amanda will first appear outside your apartment. After giving her a ride to the martial arts dojo, you’ll be able to call her for a proper date. Complete the date with Amanda (where you take photos of her) and unclaimed Health Shrines will appear on your minimap whenever you are near one.
For every five health shrines you collect, you’ll boost your max hit points by 10 percent, making you much less prone to getting knocked the %6# out.
Jade Statues appear on your minimap
You need to collect 12 Jade Statues and turn them in at the dojo, with each one earning you a new martial arts technique. After your first visit to Club Bam Bam, you’ll be able to call Tiffany for a night of drunken karaoke. Complete the date and the nearby statues will now appear on your minimap.
Note: Unfortunately, you can’t collect all of the Jade Statues until the main story is almost complete. You can grab some at any time, but roughly half of them are only reachable during specific story missions.
Cameras appear on your minimap
After the “Listening In” mission, you’ll be able to call Not-Ping for a date. Complete the date and surveillance cameras will appear on your minimap.
Lockboxes appear on your minimap
This is perhaps one of the best minimap unlocks, but sadly you won’t meet Ilyana until the latter half of the game. The Russian bartender will challenge you to a rooftop race. Simply beat her to complete the date and unlock the boxes on your minimap.
If you’ve been holding out on doing all the side missions up to this point, now would be the best time, unless you just plan to beat the game and do all the side stuff later.
Best way to make money
The finer clothes, and especially all the different vehicles, will get pretty expensive (a few million dollars) if you’re trying to collect them all. Missions throughout the game don’t really give substantial payouts, and even finishing the final mission only rewards you with $350,000 — not even enough to buy the best car available.
Instead, you can do side jobs very early on in which you must locate specific vehicles, jack them, and return them to a Triad garage. These vehicles are worth a ton of cash, and the game is extremely lenient on the damage they can take before their value diminishes. In fact, half of the time fender benders and other collisions don’t even register at all.
Do all of these missions and you’ll be sitting with approximately $5 million and change. But don’t spend it all just yet!
55 percent off vehicle purchases
The game has over 70 vehicles, and you’ll need to pay for almost all of them. While some are cheaper than a nice suit, plenty of luxury sports cars and exotics will run you several hundreds of thousands of dollars each. To make your vehicle shopping sprees much less painful, you can cut the cost of all cars in half.
To do this, you’ll need lots of Face, the game’s quasi-reputation system. You gain Face by doing favors and odd jobs like races, and you’ll need to do quite a lot to max out your Face rank. At levels 8 and 9, you can start buying expensive designer clothing that will give you up to 15 percent off on vehicle purchases.
At level 10, all vehicles will permanently cost 40 percent less. Combine the two and buying world-class exotics will be almost as cheap as shopping at Walmart.
Unlock final street races
When you meet Vivienne and Sandra, after completing their mission you’ll be able to call Sandra for a date. Take her out on the town and drive fast to rev her engines, and once the date is successful, the final set of street races will be unlocked on the map.
Easy Safe Driver Achievement
Most of the Achievements in Sleeping Dogs are straightforward: do everything and collect everything. But the Safe Driver Achievement (cruise for two minutes straight without damaging your car.) may pose a little difficulty, especially if you only ever drive the Ferraris and Lamborghini knock-offs.
To make it incredibly easy, just find a minivan. Even with the pedal to the floor, the minivan goes slower than Wei Shen can run, but this still activates the timer. Last for at least two minutes without hitting anything and you’re golden. Find a nice open highway to make it even easier.