Slocap blasted onto the scene with the phenomenal Absolver nearly five years ago, so it’s no surprise to see their next game doubling down even harder on the melee focused combat they immediately became known for. If you’ve ever wanted to feel like you were the star of your own martial arts movie, Sifu is the game for you.
Sifu
Developer: Slocap
Price: $40
Platform: PC, PS5
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
Sifu has one of the strongest openings to a game I’ve seen in a long time. A former student betrays his martial arts school, killing everyone there and leaving you as the sole survivor. Your goal is simple: kill him and all his accomplices. Sifu focuses less on telling a straight to your face story, and instead does a lot of environmental storytelling which feels fitting for this type of game. There’s a quiet somberness as your character goes from each location, dispatching everyone involved while uttering just a few choice words. The action is at the forefront of what this game is about, and Sifu makes no attempts to hide that.
Sifu takes the melee combat of Absolver and trims out all the fat from it. Gone are the various stances or cards to worry about, all that’s here are a few attack buttons and a simple list of combos to perform. You might think that’d make Sifu a simpler game, and you’d be right, but that doesn’t mean it’s easier. There’s absolutely no mashing your way to victory in Sifu. Trust me, I tried for a bit to see. You’ve got to sit there, bait out enemy attacks, then watch and learn their patterns and recognize when to strike back. Knowing how to crowd control and properly dodge/block an incoming combo, or even when there’s a brief opening in said combo to interrupt it with a combo of your own, is instrumental to progressing in Sifu. Enemies are tough, and they’ll counter your attacks and punish you accordingly if you’re not careful.
This is honestly, hands down, one of the best melee combat systems I’ve seen in a game. The complete rush I felt when in the middle of some fight sequences is second to none, with fights that leave you breathless at the end of them. Part of this is the phenomenal animation and beautiful art style of the game. Everything looks amazing in motion, and some of those attacks look downright painful.
In most games, death is the end of the line, but in Sifu it’s just another lesson learned. When your character falls in combat you have the opportunity to get back up and continue the fight. Blessed with five magic coins, these allow your character to cheat death at the cost of aging. Anytime you die you’ll earn a “death counter”, and your age will go up according to how many counters you have. So if you’re currently 25 years old, and you die with three death counters, then you’ll age up to 28. You can lower your death counters by defeating particular enemies in a level or bosses, but your age will never reverse.
You can “die” as many times as you want really, you just have to make sure you don’t age too high up. Every ten years you age, you’ll break one of your five coins. Each time this happens your character will physically age up, as gray hair and wrinkles overtake his body, but there are other changes as well. Each new age “bracket” increases your power, however at the cost of limiting your maximum health. With age comes knowledge on fighting better but at the cost of a weakened body.
There’s benefits to death, however. Dying is the only way to get to the skill screen where you can spend your XP on new abilities. There’s a variety of techniques to learn here, from new focus attacks (powerful stun maneuvers that are fueled by a focus meter) to crowd control abilities. Each time a coin breaks however, you’ll lose access to a chunk of abilities. Any you’ve unlocked will stay with you, but whatever you didn’t purchase is lost for the remainder of the run. Additionally, if you die during a level you can run back to a previous level at the age you started that particular level at, and try to beat it at a younger age so that way you can start the level you’re struggling with in a better position.
Eventually you will die, but there are safety nets in place to make your return a little bit easier. For starters, when you unlock an ability you’ll be able to bank points to permanently unlock it regardless of death. Additionally, when not in a level you’ll be at your home apartment. Here, there’s a detective board that fills in with info as you explore a level. Your detective board progress is never lost, including any keys to shortcuts you find in a level. So while you might have died to that final boss in an area, you won’t have to trudge back through the entire thing again. This all culminates in an interesting system that has you balancing when to keep pushing forward in the game and when to go back to previous levels to do better in, so you can start later levels at a younger age. Each death brings you closer and closer to success.
Something I wish the game was better at was actually teaching you how to play the game. It has a very brief (and cool) “tutorial” that introduces its concepts very quickly, but the game doesn’t take the time to slowly teach, and reinforce those things. It basically throws them at you that one time, and immediately shoves you into the deep end.
There’s a training mode where you can beat up on a computer dummy but again, with a game like this, you kind of want more options to get as comfortable with its combat system as possible. You can only set the dummy to idle or always attack, that’s it. If you want to test out focus attacks there’s no way to just always have that filled, the dummy won’t attack with power attacks, and you can’t have them spawn with a particular weapon. One thing, in particular, that would be useful is a button input popup like how fighting games have. Some combos require exact button presses and it’d be nice to know when I’m getting the timing right.
And I know what I’m complaining about here is an accessibility issue. Sifu is a hard game, where overcoming the challenge is the reward. Getting your ass beat by a particular boss over and over until it clicks is such a satisfying feeling. It’s just that I want as many people to experience the game and wish it had a better way to ease some folk into its systems. You eventually get the hang of the combat, but it comes after repeatedly getting your face smashed into a wall instead of at your own pace.
The Final Word
Sifu puts you in control of your own kung-fu film, with an exhilarating combat system and style galore.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4.5 out of 5 – Great
