If you finished getting your butt beat over and over by Sifu when it released earlier last year (you can read our review here), it’s time to jump back in because the latest Arenas update just added a whole lot more Sifu to the game.
Arenas adds, as you might expect, a variety of arena challenges for you to test your mettle in. There’s a total of 45 challenges spread across nine different arenas and each of those will feature one of five different modes: Capture, Manhunt, Time Attack, Survive and Performance. Time Attack is pretty self-explanatory, as you race to complete the objective as quickly as possible, while Survive sees you fighting increasingly stronger waves of goons with the goal of staying as young as possible by the end of it. The modes are all different enough to help keep things fresh as you work your way through all the challenges, but it does feel a bit frontloaded with Survive and Performance modes.
Additionally, each challenge features a variety of modifiers like slowing enemy movements when you guard, not being able to pick up weapons or even having infinite health. These make it so every challenge requires you to go into it with a different mindset of how you’re going to accomplish getting its high score. The movie set piece recreations you’ll find here are especially fun arenas to go through as you play through iconic moments from films like The Grandmaster or The Matrix.
If it’s been a while since you’ve played, or you haven’t bothered playing because its difficulty intimidated you too much, Sifu recently added an easier difficulty along with a variety of modifiers to help make your journey a little friendlier. The new Student difficulty increases your health and structure, while making the enemies a bit less aggressive and are less likely to use advanced combo techniques. Most importantly, this difficulty makes it so that your death count only goes up by 1.
In the base game, you’ll increase in age dependent on how many times you’ve died; so if you’ve died six times in a level next time you die you’ll age six years. This update makes it so that you only ever go up a single age. You can pair this with some modifiers that slow down enemy attacks, replace higher tier enemies in levels with lower tier ones, and most importantly a modifier that decreases your age by 1 when you beat certain powerful enemies. That last one is a particularly useful modifier for recovering from a bad streak of deaths. These come with the caveat of not saving your high score for a level, but I’m sure anyone who cares about that probably isn’t playing on easy mode.
Now this doesn’t turn the game into a total cakewalk of course, since if you’re playing badly you’ll still start to snowball your death count and the enemies still aren’t total pushovers. What this update does is just lower the bar enough for the folk who found the vanilla game just a bit too hard. Another new change is the ability to swap out the input for certain moves. For example, you can swap out your basic sweep attack with a variety of other moves which you can purchase through the currency you gain in the Arenas mode.
The Arenas update is a great excuse to dive right back into Sifu. Returning players have a breadth of new content to chew through, and the new difficulty and modifiers make it so new players might find the game’s difficulty a bit easier of a wall to climb over.
