3/22/2023 0 Comments Sifu review![]() ![]() ![]() From slums to art galleries to burning rural villages, each location is gorgeously rendered, packed with minute details that make them a pleasure to run through over and over again. Perhaps Sifu’s greatest strength is its fantastic environments. This isn’t excessively punishing, however - in a nod towards old dogs and new tricks, every skill has an age beyond which it can’t be unlocked, so by the end of a run, there’s literally nothing for the player to spend their experience points on other than permanently unlocking their skills. Sifu wants players to be absolutely certain before they commit to any one technique. Skills are fairly cheap to unlock, but if players want to keep them unlocked in all future runs, they’ll have to pay five times the base price. Killing enemies awards experience points which can be redeemed after death or at bonus shrines that appear a few times per level. Sifu lets players learn new moves through runs based on a ‘sample before paying’ kind of system. Any random enemy can kill the player with just handful of strikes, and bosses put the hero down with just a couple of solid hits. Health can be recovered by performing finishing moves on weakened enemies, so the general idea is that at the beginning of a run the player the player can absorb a few hits as they learn enemy patterns, but the further they get, the more they’ll have to rely on dodging. The older the player gets, the more damage each individual strike does, and the shorter their health bar becomes. This time passage mechanic has interesting effects on gameplay. That counter can be lowered by defeating powerful (sometimes optional) enemies, but for the majority of players, Sifu will frequently star a grey-haired master of Kung Fu. After the first death they’ll be 21 years old, the second will put them at 23, and so forth. ![]() While that may sound like a huge number of chances, in practice, players can go through that lifetime incredibly quickly as the penalty grows each time. Failure, in this case, costs time, with the player starting at 20, and failing their run if they die over the age of 70. The price? Years are tacked onto their age with every revival. They’re aided in this quest by a set of magic coins that resurrect them any time they’re killed. ![]() Sifu‘s angle is to go in the opposite direction by sweeping that elegance off the table and asking the player to map out every single blow and micromanage every detail of a fight in an attempt to simulate realistic mechanics of battle… and then it doesn’t give the player any of the tools necessary to make that possible.Ī third-person brawler/roguelite set in the kind of locales where one might expect to see a martial arts fight take place, the nearly-plotless Sifu puts players in the slippers of a martial arts student who witnessed their family being massacred eight years earlier, and has spent the intervening time preparing themselves for a vengeance quest. Dozens of other games have copied this structure to great effect, and it’s one of those indisputable evolutions in game design which feels so natural that in hindsight, it’s amazing that someone didn’t invent it sooner. The innovation that made this possible was the ‘counter’ button, a single tap of which interrupts whatever the player is doing, and has them deliver a punishing blow to the foe about to attack. They found a way to make a fight look and feel like a martial arts film, with a single hero battling scores of enemies simultaneously - and they did it all without getting into the minutiae of specific mechanics for every blow. In many ways, the ‘brawler’ genre its apotheosis with Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum and its sequels. Sifu is constructed around an ambitious concept that I suspect appeals to extremely few people. WTF Sucker-punching is the ultimate technique. LOW Minibosses showing up whenever they want. HIGH Executing a perfect set of dodges and then walloping a goon. ![]()
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