Sifu Reviews

Very steep learning curve, but one you master the game, you're basically an unstoppable one person army. I recommend trying cosmetic mods so you can select from thousands of characters and play as who you want.

Absolutely cracking game! Beautiful, difficult and very exciting experience. Sometimes heart racing moments and the bosses are very challenging! Good luck!

Punishing but rewarding as hell stylish 3D beat-em-up gameplay that contains easily the best rendition of the "Arkham-style" combat to date. Despite the comparisons that could be drawn to other games, Sifu is a game unlike any other that captures all the fluidity, discipline, and style that comes with Kung-Fu, with near-perfect bosses, a runtime that never overstays its welcome, and enough post-game content and challenges to keep it incredibly replayable. Only real gripe I have is that the game does not do a good job of letting you know how to get the true ending, which is fine for a first run, but it really could have dropped more hints as to how to get it. If you're curious, just look up a guide.

[h1]É pra apanhar e ficar calado[/h1] Naturalmente você vai dominando o jogo ao ponto de ficar muito bom e parar de apanhar igual cadela. No início é revoltante o quanto eu apanhei, mas agora é tranquilo. Jogo curto e gostoso, meio rogue like mas do seu jeito único.

Sifu is a wicked-hard game that completely nails its kung-fu movie theme. Sifu’s presentation all contributes perfectly to this theme (especially with Chinese voice-over). Each area is extremely distinct and creative with, and yet none take away from the theming. A club will exit into blazing paifang, a museum will exit into a snowy garden with stone lanterns. Modern, yet classic. It’s all very well done. The cell-shaded artstyle and music perfectly contribute to this presentation. I couldn’t ask for any better. As far as the story is concerned, it isn’t too crazy. A bunch of people conspired to kill your dad - go kill them. I appreciate the minimalism. Definitely fits the kung-fu movie theme. Sifu’s gameplay feels unique is the space of beat-em-ups. The best way to dodge attacks is not the dash-dodge, but a spot dodge that you aim in place. When you’re playing at your most effective, you’re standing in place parrying all the enemy’s light attacks and spot dodging all their heavy attacks. You really have to pay attention to not only when an enemy is attacking, but where they are attacking. This creates very engaging (and hard) gameplay that is extremely satisfying to pull off. I was Jackie Chan, and I was untouchable. My only issue with the gameplay is the upgrades and the skill tree. At least half of upgrades and items on the skill tree are completely useless. Additional combos for the sake of additional combos or upgrades that completely pale in comparison to others. My favorite part Sifu is the death system. Why? Because it does what I found impossible: making reviving in the middle of a level fun and challenging. You can die & revive on the spot. HOWEVER each death makes you older, subsequent death make the punishment bigger, miniboss/boss kills make the punishment smaller. When you die at 70, you have to reset the level. With how brutally difficult this game is, you’re going to die a lot. It forces a decent level of mastery that most games won’t push you to, but not so much that it’s unrealistic. Being challenged is exactly what I want from a game, and this game really pushes that button. I doubt there is a game that captures kung-fu movies better than this one.

TL;DR - Without the crashing, SIFU is a 7 or 8/10 for me: a great game that is held back by the complex and often frustrating dodging system and its insistence on grinding. With the crashing, it's more like a 5/10. The game offers a lot of fun content for the price, but I find myself frustrated by a few issues, so I'm posting this as a note of caution for those who are interested. If Steam had "neutral" review option, this would be a good candidate for it. I like a lot about the game's art style, animations, combat system, and presentation. In the end, I really wanted to like the game more, but there are a few things that could use some polish: 1. It crashes often for me, sometimes in the middle of an important fight. I spent the last hour playing and it crashed twice in that period of time. I don't seem to have this issue with other games based on Unreal Engine or with other games with similar requirements, so I don't suspect my PC. This seems to happen most often in the Arenas mode. I've had at least 5-6 crashes over 10 hours of play time. That's just frustrating, especially when you have a good round going. 2. Some attacks just seem unavoidable, and it's unclear why you took damage despite using your dodge options. This part of the game is complex. You have three separate ways to avoid any given attack: parry by tapping LB, hold LB and flick the joystick in an appropriate to evade, or "dodge roll"/backstep out of the way with RT. This makes it frustrating when certain attacks (like the palm strikes of certain kickboxer-style enemies) don't seem to respond consistently to any of those options. The game prides itself on not telegraphing too much to you - like the store page says, enemies "don't broadcast their intent" - but it's frustrating when you don't know what the problem was. Did I go too early? Too late? Wrong "type" of dodge? A couple more tutorials that would train you to avoid these specific attacks would be really welcome. The game is clearly meant to have a high learning curve and an equally high skill ceiling, and I really like the effort to freshen up the "Arkham combat" genre, but the dodging aspect of the game often feels unkind rather than challenging. 3. The system of upgrades is needlessly grindy. When you die, certain upgrades reset and you have to buy them a number of times to make them permanent. If you replay a level to beat it at a younger "age," which is the unique way that this game handles its lives system, then you lose any upgrades or bonuses that you earned when you beat that level. A system that lets you retroactively earn and keep more progress would be much more fun to me. Conclusion: I couldn't recommend a game that crashes this much at the full asking price, so I would recommend grabbing it during a sale if you are interested in the type of challenge this game seeks to provide. Edit: After giving this another shot, I'm here to update my review. The last boss confirmed my negative opinion of the game (minor non-story spoiler ahead) by essentially negating a main combat mechanic that you can use during the rest of the game. This is the kind of mechanic that affects your build. It's like having the final boss of a fantasy RPG be immune to all magic. Not so great if you put all of your points into wizard stuff. So unless you're hungry for that kind of last-minute abuse, this game may not be for you. If you get frustrated, you can google a cheese for it.

Quite enjoyable brawler game. You play as Kung Fu Guy, out for revenge against the Kill Bill roster of five bad dudes who killed your Sensei and left you for dead. There's five stages where you invade each big boss's home turf, battle through hordes of minions and minibosses before facing off against the signature boss leader. Beat all five and you have your revenge! The combat system is the entire focus of the game and it is quite technically sound. It's a lot of Sekiro and a little bit of the Batman Arkham games. You mix together light attacks and heavy attacks with a variety of special kicks punches sweeps and feints to damage enemies while trying to keep them off balance and deflect their blows. The game is extremely difficult at first and you will be pounded into the ground in short order if you just go in mashing attacks. Like Sekiro, both you and enemies have a health meter and a balance meter. Fill up the balance meter on enemies and they can be executed with a takedown move, instantly defeating them. Or you could deplete all their health. Certain attacks deal more health than balance damage but most attacks deal more balance than health, so typically you fill an enemy or boss's balance meter and finish them with a takedown, but not always. YOUR balance meter goes up if you block attacks, and if filled you take the next hit and get staggered and open for other attacks. Attacks do huge damage to you if they connect and you cannot take many. You can deflect hits by hitting the guard button when an attack lands, which instead inflicts balance damage to the enemy's stagger meter. Sometimes a deflected hit results in a parry where the enemy bounces off you and is staggered for a VERY short period of time allowing you to use counter moves. Enemies can also start blocking and parrying if you attack them repeatedly without pause. You can also dodge hits which restore your balance meter (a lot faster than waiting for it to slowly regen), and dodging the last hit in an enemy's combo usually allows you to immediately start an unblocked combo chain on them. Some attacks can't be blocked or deflected and must be dodged. There's all sorts of improvised weapons you can pick up and use too like bottles, pipes, and sticks that vastly increase your damage/stagger output while improving your guarding. They quickly break after smashing in a few enemy heads so you often are churning through weapons quickly and it's fun and cool from a martial arts movie thematic sense. In a group setting enemies will usually attack you one by one, and if you start wailing on one enemy another might try and sneak a hit in on you from behind. So you get the Batman Arkham type flow where you attack one guy and wait for the next guy to start attacking, counter them, and throw in takedowns whenever available to thin out the enemies. You also have special abilities available like sweeping kicks that might hit multiple enemies and knock them down, attacks which absorb an incoming attack while attacking at the same time, a low punch that avoids high attacks, attacks which push an enemy (and might knock them into others or a wall doing chain reaction damage to all their posture) and so on. The system gets really deep at an individual level and all attacks are extremely precise so if you get the timing just right everything flows really well. Things aren't perfect. The game is really REALLY hard at first because things are so overwhelming. Once you sort of figure out to calm down and watch what the enemy is doing when you're in a 1 on 1 scenario you can better focus on dodging and countering rather than rushing in and attacking repeatedly. But problems persist. Sometimes the game allows two or more enemies attack at the same time in a group scenario and things go sideways. You can sometimes dodge when you see it happen and both swing at once, but when they attack in a staggered manner you can often get animation locked into doing something after blocking/dodging the first attack and get hit with nothing you could do. The other problem is there's actually three kinds of dodges, the full dodge (avoid?) which you actually never want to do since it can't open the enemy up for counters and doesn't heal your balance, and the "high" and "low" dodge. The low dodge dodges 95% of the attacks in the game and is the one you will use all the time, but the "high" dodge must be used to dodge attacks directed along the ground or at your legs, which are infrequent. It's EXTREMELY difficult to recognize that an enemy has thrown in a low attack in the middle of their combo and realize you have to high dodge in the 300 ms of processing time you have to hit the button sequence. Pick the wrong dodge and take huge damage. Some bosses mix these attacks in their combo chains consistently and have long windups you can see coming, but a couple throw them in at random and it feels extremely cheap by the game. They honestly should have ditched this feature entirely and had the one dodge type. Sifu is a great game! You feel accomplished by the end, especially with the true ending which makes your character even cooler thematically.

Absolute peak. The combat is so fun and improvement feels so rewarding, genuinely one the most FUN games to play in along time. I am 76 hours in and only recently managed to beat the first level with zero deaths. Now I'm trying to beat level 2 without dying but Sean is tough cookie and always gets me at least once. But I don't even notice the time pass.

The perfect martial arts fighting game! (10/10) Sifu was a game that I first saw through the PlayStation Release trailer back in 2021, and it quickly became my most anticipated game. Finally playing it, I'm proud to say the game has exceeded my expectations tremendously and acts as the perfect hallmark for what video games should be. STORY (10/10): Sifu tells a simple story, a quest of vengeance, that takes the protagonist across numerous settings and landscapes. Albeit quite short, it captures a strong message about revenge, blending it with the central Rise mechanic of the game, with the protagonist getting progressively older with each death. Despite its short length, the game grants a lot of depth and autonomy in how the protagonists choose to convey their journey, resulting an in ending that feels both satisfying and integral to the core narrative of this experience. ART STYLE (10/10): Sifu's unique cell shader style makes the game's visual experience both bold and crisp. The game really leans into blending different colours and tones to convey the different atmospheres and scenes, making each encounter feel unique and exciting. This harmonises together into meaningful world-building that sets the mood for each boss battle. Furthermore, the game is very honest with its inspirations, including a lot of references and nods to other martial arts adding a rich layer of traditional and celebration. GAMEPLAY (10/10): The mechanics and controls blend together seamlessly, creating combat that is easy to learn but hard to master. This in tandem with the Rise mechanic, whereby your character ages after each death (resulting in less health but more damage), both heightens the stakes and diegetically builds a cohesive narrative of becoming a martial arts master. The incorporation of the Pak Mei martial arts style feels fresh, adding a taste of acrobatic ability and brutality (especially with the finishers). Furthermore, the amount of free post-launch content in the Arena Mode makes revisiting this game a must, especially with the different challenges and game modes. Overall, I absolutely adore Sifu, in terms of its message, art direction and gameplay and I look forward to revisiting this title in many years to come.

Sifu should've won Best Fighting Game award, but it lost to a now dead live service game...