Chalk this up as the year’s biggest surprise, for sure. A troubled development and ambitious designs on a genre that few developers are talented enough to pull off rarely equals anything worth shouting about, and I don’t think any tears were shed when it was dropped by Activision and looked to be destined for a life spent filling retrospective articles about what might have been.

Frankly it would have been a surprise if Sleeping Dogs had come out at all, so the fact that it appeared and was as good as it turned out was shocking. It also subverted the received wisdom that urban crime games have to be set in the US to be a success, topping charts around the world.

It deserved it too. It was polished, the city made a nice change from New York or LA again, and both the hand-to-hand combat and gunplay took a dump on GTA’s routinely flaky equivalents. Really, if GTA comes out and is content to recycle the mediocre-at-best shooting of previous instalments – and there’s no excuse considering that its immediate predecessor in the Rockstar oeuvre is Max Payne 3 – it’ll deserve every negative comparison to Sleeping Dogs it gets.

United Front’s invention and love of genre film is continuing with the DLC – Asian horror and classic kung fu respectively – and hopefully this series will continue where its original home, Activision’s True Crime, looks to be left to die. There’s a joke in there about exploitation cinema somewhere.