Sifu has really taken me by surprise. I wasn't expecting this to be so beautifully focused on martial arts. There's a lot of style in the direction the game has chosen to take and although I agree it could use a bit more visual and audio flare, maybe taking a few notes out of Hi-Fi Rushs book, it still looks amazing and there's something to be said about it's simplicity.

There's an almost zen like feel to this game where dialogue is sprinkled very lightly throughout, used only during important scenes. For the majority of the time it's just you, your focus, and your positioning. Each step counts. Each use of your hands and legs count. Landing that staggering blow on your opponent and finishing them off, or performing a palm push on your enemy which knocks others around them backwards to create some breathing room, or even holding a button which locks your arm downwards and then releasing it when your enemy pauses to backhand them in the face is what this game is all about.

The game is brutal, it's effectively a martial arts sim. You will die a lot, aging a few years each time before you rise back up again (which is a really neat mechanic), but it's your resiliance and willing to learn and improve that keeps you moving forward.

I really don't want to spoil the game anymore than I have because discovering it all for yourself, especially the cinematic visuals, is part of the joy. Going into this blind reminded me why sometimes it's nice to be surprised by a game. If you're like me and grew up watching a fair few martial arts films that made it to western media, you'll probably really enjoy this. The Mandarin language option apparently sounds very natural according to some native speakers, so that's a plus if you enjoy experiencing games in a more authentic way (still annoys me that lip syncing isn't matched to native languages in a lot of games). The photo mode is pretty decent too, had a lot of fun with it.

Sifu is an amazing game to play, starting with an exciting and relatively simple combat system which you can eventually learn in such detail that it reveals an incredible amount of depth. Unfortunately, every other aspect of the game suffers somewhat from this focus. I think it was still the right choice. No one would really care about this game at all if it didn’t nail it’s martial arts movie simulator combat. But I found the game lacking in terms of visual design, sound design, and narrative design pretty much across the board, with all of the sub-categories of those aspects being either weak or just kind of average. A bit more visual flair, compelling cinematography in the cutscenes, or even just a killer soundtrack would have really elevated this game in my estimation. As it is, it becomes a game where you just kind of sink into the gameplay, every other artistic aspect of the work sort of blurring away as none of it is especially memorable. The one minor standout being its environmental design. I found it started quite dull, but with each new area the environments grew more and more interesting and they made the most of it with the weak visuals available, though there’s quite a lot of reliance on dream-world style environment warping that I don’t really think matches the game’s narrative.

So, since all of that sounds pretty negative, I want to make it clear I absolutely recommend this game. I had a great time with it, and I think anyone who enjoys a really hard and deep combat system will as well. That’s where all the brilliance of the development went, and it paid off. The game is a semi-roguelike in that you’ll run through the same levels opening up new paths and shortcuts, while gathering permanent info and ability unlocks. Every time you die, your character ages by several years, which also causes your 5 piece talisman to occasionally shatter, resulting in your eventual death where you’ll need to restart from the beginning to get better and avoid as many deaths. Aging isn’t all bad though: you’ll have less health but deal more damage the older you get. Why? I don’t know, it’s magic I guess.

Sifu is a game that gives you an enormous amount of mechanics that will completely overwhelm you at the start, but sets it up so that you’ll be slowly focusing on new ones bit by bit and mastering them until they become natural, at which point you can move on to the next one. It also avoids the issues that a lot of games of this sort have, including my beloved Sekiro, in that there really isn’t one ultimate end-all-be-all action that will solve everything (in Sekiro it’s deflections). For defensive options, you can block, parry, weave, duck, jump, and dodge. All of them are necessary for different types of attacks and you’ll need to vary them to maintain your character’s Structure, which will leave you completely vulnerable if you let it build up to max. The more I played the game, even right up to the end, I was learning the advantages of mechanics I had often neglected.

The game has a good deal of content to compel you to make multiple play throughs, further incentivizing mastery. And while it is very hard, it’s not demoralizingly punishing. I played the game over the course of about a week, and repeatedly went from thinking I had zero chance of ever learning how to handle this boss or enemy to getting good enough to push through them with relative ease. And I’m really, generally not very good at action games, so I think most people will be able to beat it if they stick with it and are willing to learn and engage with the game’s depth.

Sifu is a brawler fighting game that places a massive amount of emphasis on mastering its mechanics. There's a lot that it gets right - tight fighting mechanics, neat stylized graphics, and replayable levels - but it also really only has a small of content to show you. And it wants you to play that content over and over and over until you've memorized every attack pattern, every combo, every dodge, etc.

As a metaphor, I'd describe Sifu as a great 15 minute short film that wants you to rewatch it 10 times before you "really get it". You could make the comparison to things like Soulsbourne games (in terms of the mastery curve), but the thing is, those games actually have massive amounts of content, usually with upwards of dozens of bosses and enemy types. Sifu is good, but at times, I kept asking myself, how more attempts do I really want to throw at this?

(In depth below)

Sifu has a total of 5 enemy types, and those types each have 3 variants in their difficulty, and it has 5 bosses, each with two phases. That's the entire game - and that's not to say there isn't depth to be found in there, but it's also asking you to replay a lot of the same material over and over until you haven't taken more than one or two deaths in a level.

The core combat formula is like Sekiro's - you and enemies have health and a "structure" bar. Depleting enemies health knocks them out, and depleting their structure allows you to do a finisher that instantly KOs them. Dealing damage to enemies makes it easier to deplete their structure as well.

The combat itself is mostly tight. In truth, despite the game featuring a bunch of moves and combos, there's only a handful you really need to know - parry, deflect, up/down dodge, strong / light attacks, and using weapons. Most of your game will be spent learning how to use the defensive options (and maybe something can be said of how that plays into the game's themes).

Attacks can generally be parried, which depletes enemy structure, but at times it can be challenging to figure out you're doing the right action to counter a given attack. The game actually doesn't explain this, but there's both perfect and "soft" parries, which I didn't realize until after having beaten the game. Some of the bosses in particular have attack patterns that make them very frustrating to experiment against to get a hang of what can be parried, dodged, etc.

Outside of combat, there's a lot of somewhat puzzling issues with its game systems that are in tension with one another. For instance, the experience you gain is only pseudo-permanent - if you replay prior levels, you lose the experience and upgrades. There's a massive amount of special moves and combos, but odds are, you don't want to rely on anything besides the basics and a few essential upgrades. You can practice against enemies and bosses in a training room, but you can only practice versus bosses that you've already beat, which seems like a silly inconvenience. Minor spoiler: if you put your skill points into the special Focus moves, be prepared to be disappointed when you arrive to the final boss, to discover he is immune to them. At this stage of the game, the only viable option is to replay the entire game over in order to reallocate your points, because there isn't another way to do it.

The story of the game is... unfortunately, it goes from promising to not good. The premise is that a group of 5 martial artists break into their master's school, kill him and the disciples, steal a precious artifact, and one of them tries to kill the (unnamed) main character to leave them for dead. He is revived by a mystic talisman that resurrects him, albeit older, every time he falls in combat. You embark on a journey to take revenge on these 5 fighters. The conclusion of the story is... cheesy and I don't even really want to talk about it. Yang is such a lame villain and his voice actor does not sell the lines well.

The visual directions of the levels is amazing. Everywhere from gang drug farms, nightclubs, art exhibits - and cooler yet, most of the levels visually morph to some degree. The nightclub level initially caught me off guard, as late in the level, you walk through a doorway and are walking through a layout that's similar to the opening, but everything is burning. Even though the cel shading graphics are simplistic, the art really sells it.

So, all in all, why am I hesitant to recommend this game? I think what it comes down to is, I spent 16 hours with the game, and I probably spent close to 12 hours just replaying the levels to make it further into the game with fewer deaths. Can you beat the level's 5 fight scenes and the boss only dying once? After so many attempts, it stopped feeling exciting when I did marginally better, it just felt relieved that I got to play another level.

There is a part of me that wants to imagine, wow, I could spend another 15-30 hours mastering this game to beat the final boss at an even earlier life!... but that really doesn't seem that appealing knowing I've experienced all the content 100 times over. Now the only thing left to do is to get incrementally better at dodging the bodyguard's attack pattern, or to get the parry timings down for a boss a smidge better.

So that's my verdict. I had a lot of thoughts about this game, because I really feel like there's a lot I love about this game, a lot that I think is kind of messy with this game, and a lot that I don't really know how to feel about. It's a cool game, and I pushed myself to finish it (true ending included), and I still don't really feel inclined to recommend it - but, hey, you might really like it!

Sifu is one of those games that I probably would’ve never played had it not been a free monthly PS Plus game. Looking for something small to play after beating Hogwarts Legacy, I found Sifu in my library and decided to give it a try.

One reason I wasn’t too keen on Sifu when it first released was it appeared to be one of those Soulslikes, a game that reveled in being punishingly difficult. There’s also the unique mechanic this game was marketed on, the aging system. Each time you die your character ages, starting from 20 to 70. Each ten years, there’s a physical change to your character, like grey hair or a beard. As your character ages, they do more damage but lose some of their overall max health. There’re also certain upgrades on the skill tree that are only available under a certain age. As someone who doesn’t enjoy the “die, repeat, die” grind of Soulslikes, I did play Sifu on the easiest difficulty, and with some handicaps that slowed down the aging process, because I believe if you run out of lives and die for good you have to start your run all the way at the beginning, like a roguelike, which is another style of gameplay I don’t enjoy.

With all that working against my possible enjoyment of Sifu, what drew my interest was the combat system. I originally thought this game was a simple, side scroller beat’em up, but after seeing some more gameplay, I learned this is a fully fleshed out 3D game. The combat takes cues from the rhythmic combat games like Arkham or older Assassin’s Creed. I’ve noticed modern games have a trend of putting the punch and block buttons on the triggers. It’s a control scheme I’ve never been able to adapt to. Growing up, punch, kick, and block were always on the face buttons and that’s been hardwired into my head. Luckily, Sifu does allow you to rebind all your controls. The controls are simple, but how the game uses them is where the skill comes in.

You can block or dodge attacks, but the most effective way to avoid blows is by bobbing and weaving. Basically, you hold the block button, then use the left analog to dodge your opponent’s blows like a boxer. It does help keep fights close, frantic, and fast. Unfortunately, either I’m too slow or the game doesn’t do the best in telegraphing enemy moves. You can dodge in all four directions and you get about a half second to figure out where an enemy is going to attack. It led to me getting hit a lot until after about the third time I got hit with the same combo and learned it’s motions. You can also perform your own combos using the left analog stick and face buttons. I found the game to be very temperamental on reading my inputs for the combos. I have some experience with fighting combos from Mortal Kombat, but I had trouble reliably performing many of Sifu’s combos. Luckily, on easy mode, simple light/heavy attack combos and dodges are easy enough to perform and keep most fights moving along.

Sifu plays like a classic martial arts film with a hint of Chinese mysticism mixed in. I feel like there’s a name for that kind of genre of magical martial art films, but I’ve always been a peripheral fan of kung fu media. Nailing the flow of a fight makes you feel like Jackie Chan as you throw kicks and punches, taking on crowds of goons. There’s also a John Wick style influence in the art design with a lot of stark colors and moody lighting. One level has you fighting through an art exhibit that uses colors in unique ways, replacing the standard museum with a surreal room bathed in fog and color. The boss fights are all in these dramatic locations like a snowy mountaintop or bamboo forest. No one can say this game lacks in artistic style. The music is another high point. It’s a mix of classic Chinese music and modern techno beats. It’s that little extra seasoning on top of each fight.

The story carries on that martial arts movie vibe. It’s a classic if very basic plot. You play the child of a kung fu master who is murdered by a former student and his gang of ne’er-do-wells. They swear revenge and hone their kung fu skills for 8 years before tracking down and killing all of the gang members. Like an old kung fu or spaghetti western film, there’s not a lot of dialogue, instead using the language of film to tell the story. That’s probably for the best, because the voice acting is pretty flat from everyone, at least in the English version. Your character has a ribbon of magic talismans that allow them to cheat death and each gang member has a special power and weapon associated with them. As you progress through the game, your thirst for revenge is questioned. Most of the gang members have moved on from that past life. They mention not wanting to fight you. After killing the man who killed your father all those years ago, the talismans send you back to the beginning of your revenge tour with a message that boils down to letting go of your anger and being the bigger man. You can then replay through the game with a mechanic where you can spare the gang members to get the true ending. Seeing as a barely got through the first run through, I just watched the good ending on YouTube.

All in all, Sifu was a fun little game that doesn’t take long to get through. It oozes with style and the combat is fun to master, even if I found the combos to be a bit finicky. If you are someone who enjoys a challenging fighter game, this game will offer a challenge. If you like the game for the kung fu movie styling, like me, then I would still recommend this game thanks to the variety of options to make the difficulty more approachable.