Sleeping Dogs, after a decade. I was playing Yakuza and it was disappointing me and just made me want to play Sleeping Dogs. Now, I don't much like this either, to be honest. I wouldn't say it's bad, it just doesn't feel like it holds up in a lot of ways. The basic gameplay is fine. Some people said its repetitive, but it couldn't be any more repetitive than shooting people from cover. The cars are arcadey, but it has lots of movie-like things like being able to jump from car to car, so it's not great for racing but it works well for chases. Foot chases (with lots of climbing, jumping, very light parkour) are good, they only really come up in missions but they feel great. The story is fine. Yakuza is interesting because of how Japanese it is, how inane it is, but it also sucks any real impact out of the story, and most importantly, its presentation is complete dogshit. Sleeping Dogs is, as far as GTA clones go, one of the best-written ones with its crime/detective drama angle. It's fairly serious.
There's not much in the way of side activities. With Yakuza I found some were decent, most aren't. Everything is gated behind several menus and clicks with little to no voice acting or animation. Things work smoother in Sleeping Dogs. But you really just have mahjong, cockfighting, and karaoke. Karaoke is okay. I like its implementation better than in Yakuza (with analogizing it to keeping the right tone by holding the stick at the right pitch), though it really is just this asshole singing, so it's not great quality music. (Better than Japshit.) Cockfighting is a complete waste of time. Only other game I know of doing that is Far Cry 6 as a parody of fighting game. This nails the cockfight experience as it is in reality: you bet money and you randomly win or you don't. There's nothing you can do to influence it (like playing as the bird) or to try and determine the true odds (like inspecting birds, or whatever). The mahjong is gated behind a mission and is way off in the middle of nowhere. Terrible design choice there, side missions and content are ideally sprinkled throughout a map so that you can naturally do it while wandering in between other tasks. That's one thing Yakuza aces.
You can tell what era it was made because there are a million dating missions that are there for no good reason other than GTA decided (somewhat more understandably) that building a harem is a gangsta activity.
The first ghetto is a really good map.
Overall, kind of disappointed with this. I can see why I liked it so much, but I can also see why the GTA clone died out.