Sifu is an innovative beat em up that will make you feel like a character from an old-school kung fu film. Its fast-paced action is contrasted by the methodical approach it forces you to learn so you can clear out its challenging murder rooms with elegance rather than button mashing, and once mastered its fluid dodge and parry systems result in one of the most satisfying gaming experiences of the year.
Sifu’s difficulty comes from its combat scenarios that will test your reflexes by making you parry and dodge with precision to make it past even its first level. You will repeat levels over and over again to learn the best time to parry certain moves and the best ways to approach certain enemies. The difficulty while jarring at first does become manageable as you put in the effort to learn the mechanics and timings it expects you to learn. The only moments where I felt the game was being unfair were in scenarios where the camera was not keeping up with the barrage of enemies surrounding me and would cause me to die due to unfortunate camera angles.
Repetition is something that is encouraged with its aging mechanic that starts you off as a 20-year-old and as you lose fights the faster you’ll age till you game over at your 70s. Aging allows you to spend more time in fights, giving you the opportunity to learn from your mistakes and making your attacks stronger as you age up, but it also comes with the drawbacks that you lose health, certain skills get locked and more importantly you will be stuck in the next level with the age you beat the previous one, encouraging you to replay levels aiming to stay as young as possible.
Sifus style is simply stunning, from its art design to its score, there as several moments in this game that made me think, “that would be a great painting”. One of the standout moments comes from the second level that has you moving between two very different environments that are equally stylish and the rest of the game has several moments that just make you want to spend more time playing the levels just to have fun with the photo mode and take in the scenery.
Handholding is not a word in Sifu’s dictionary and its commitment to having the player learn things on their own is appreciated when it comes to its level design, but when it comes to its upgrade system and year counter it straight up gets confusing. The number of years you age per death lower each time you defeat a specifically hard enemy, but I had several instances where it reset by just defeating a seemingly random wave of enemies and I was left confused as to why. Its upgrade system is also awkward because you can unlock moves by getting points through combat, but the game doesn’t communicate properly how to unlock moves permanently or that moves get locked away the older you are, and because of this, you have to discover most of it through trial and error.
Sifu has been an incredibly addicting gaming experience, I have found myself craving to go back and replay levels to try and pass them with no deaths or explore new routes that I hadn’t explored before and that is the magic of Sifu, yes it is difficult, but it always makes you feel like you can improve from your mistakes, and over time you can basically speedrun areas that were killing you non stop at one point.
Although I did have a few instances where I felt the camera was beating me worse than the enemies, I still believe that Sifus combat design combined with its satisfying difficulty makes it one of the most replayable and addicting games of 2022.
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