You'd be forgiven some trepidations about any game that's charted as ... unconventional a course to retail shelves as Sleeping Dogs.

It first went into development at United Front Games as "Black Lotus," then transformed to a reboot of Activision's True Crime series. Then, as the mega-publisher let the game slide into the hands of Square-Enix, it lost the legacy branding and was re-redubbed Sleeping Dogs.

The ship that emerges from those choppy waters is surprisingly seaworthy, but it's not without a few cracks in the hull. For some, Sleeping Dogs may be hard to ignore.