Sifu | PS5 Review

Sifu is a game of frustrating dualities. It has some of the most mechanically dense and interesting combat of any game out there, but it’s muddled in confusing upgrade mechanics. The levels are artistically beautiful and loaded with thrilling set piece battles, but you’ll be replaying them ad nauseum. There is an exciting kung-fu story at the outset, but seems confused about itself by the end. Despite all of this, I can’t put it down.

Dodge This

As evidenced in its marketing, Sifu is most interested in making you feel like a martial arts master. It does this not by making you an overpowered ass kicker, but by making you earn your skills. The game holds back no punches. Enemies can kill you in only a few hits, and the only way to recover health is earned with takedown moves. Bosses are gonna wreck you at first, seeming like insurmountable foes. You must become the master.

This is because, more than anything, Sifu demands your patience. You have to learn its intricacies, and accept that there are no half-measures. When an enemy attacks, you can dodge, block, parry, weave, duck low, or hop high. That’s six different options just for when an enemy attacks you.

I Know Kung Fu

This speaks nothing to your offensive options, which are every bit as intricate as you might expect. Combos are constructed with heavy/light attacks, and your goal is to drain enemies’ health or “structure.” If you attack quickly and with skill, you’ll destroy that structure and get to perform a takedown. Takedowns are essential as you’re invincible during the animation, and it replenishes a small portion of your health. So that’s your goal in most encounters, take down enemies as fast as possible and utilize all takedown opportunities.

This is all well and good, but it is much easier said than done. Sifu is not on your side, and is in fact a pretty poor teacher, so you’ll be dying a lot. Setting this game apart, however, is that dying ages you. Die once, you’ll age by one year. Twice, by an additional two years. The number keeps growing in your death counter, and though that death count gets reduced in a few ways, it nonetheless can add up quickly. Hit 70, and it’s all over.

Deja Vu

The real bastard of it is that your age carries over to the next level. There’s only five levels in the game and each can be beaten in a half hour, but you’re gonna be pouring a lot more time into them than that. Even if you get past the mobs easily, the bosses are no joke. They demand perfection from you, and you’re gonna have to put the time into learning their attack patterns. It’s frustrating at first, but it feels damn good when you finally beat them only dying once or twice.

He’s Beginning to Believe

So your overall flow in the game is trying to beat each level, and its associated boss, with as few deaths as possible. It leads to a feeling unlike any other game, where even when you beat that boss, it rarely feels triumphant. You’ll only be disappointed that you beat the boss aged 45 instead of the starting age of 20. Conversely, if you choose to keep running and perfecting a single level, it feels mighty badass to beat it at only 22 or 23.

Staying young benefits you not only by giving you more lives in the following levels, but also keeping your access to unlocked abilities. As you get older, learning some skills gets cut off. Guess you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Now getting old does increase your damage output at the cost of your overall health, so I suppose it’s up to you to balance your own risk vs. reward.

Free Your Mind

You can mitigate this somewhat by the game’s skill tree. It can only be accessed at preset shrines (checkpoints of a sort) or upon death. This entire skill tree is convoluted as hell. There’s an “entry” level of access to each ability, but that access restarts when you die. Well, kind of. Once you purchase past the “entry” level, you can buy into it five more times after that. Your five buy-ins are permanent, so even if you die and have to buy “entry” to the ability again, it’ll keep your buy-ins. This means that if you’ve bought in twice, when you restart and get past that “entry” free, you’ll only have to buy-in three more times to make it permanent so you’ll never have to purchase “entry” again.

Sounds confusing and annoying? It sure is. Made more so by how frustrating it is to remember which skills you have during your current run. If you get “entry” to a skill and forget to get it again, it’s pretty damn annoying to find out you don’t have it in the middle of a fight. Sifu is a game all about utilizing every skill at your disposal, so a skill tree system that takes away abilities is baffling to me. It just leads to you only focusing on a single skill until you buy it enough to make sure it’ll always be there, which renders the whole “entry” fee thing entirely pointless. It’s a baffling ass design decision, and I still can’t wrap my head around why it’s built this way. Especially when there’s 25 or so skills in a game that’ll only take you six hours to beat.

Stop Trying To Hit Me and Hit Me

Those six hours or so hours are spent in some beautiful levels, though. Each has a cool theme, and takes a supernatural turn at some point. You’ll never know what to expect around the corner, and that can only be a good thing. It’s consistently surprising you, even on repeat playthroughs.

Sifu is not going to be for everyone. It’s not friendly, and I wish it was more straightforward than it is. I personally kind of wish there was a more linear mode, but I can understand how that would go against what SloClap is trying to accomplish by having you master the game. The combat is some of the best in any action game you’ll play, and the bosses are fun to master, but there’s also a lot of frustration surrounding it.

Some of the enemy attacks are poorly telegraphed, and those deaths feel cheap, though not as cheap as when the camera becomes awful when it’s backed against a wall. But again, despite all of these frustrations, I just can’t stop playing around with its exquisite combat suite. It’s hard to really describe how much satisfaction can be felt in it. I said I put about six hours into beating it, and that’s true, but I’m at nearly twenty at the time of the review. It’s that fun, if you can exercise the patience to get there.

To hear me talk more about Sifu, be sure to listen to Episode 384 of The Gaming Outsider Podcast around the 1:23:36 mark.

This review is based on a purchased copy of Sifu. It is also available on PlayStation 4 and PC via Epic Games Store.