Sloclap’s previous game and the spiritual predecessor of this game was Absolver, a similar game with an online multiplayer focus. Sifu has become an indie darling even before it got released. Did Sloclap deliver on their promise of martial arts goodness? Is Sifu good, is it worth it? Wooden partitions can be broken and their pieces can be used as weapons, ottomans can be slid across the ground to knock bad guys off their feet, bottles can be flung straight off a table into a thug’s face and you can smoothly scale walls or hop over obstacles to get the jump on a foe.Sifu Review Scores are in. Throw an enemy near a balcony and you’ll just hurl them right over throw them near a waist or chest high wall and you’ll smash their face into it throw them in the direction of a glass barricade and they’ll stagger a bit before crashing through it. Dizzy enemies can be thrown in any direction, and the throw is context-sensitive depending on where you’re throwing them. The best part of Sifu’s combat, though, is how much you’re able to use the environment as a weapon. Guarding requires no timing but is governed by a meter that fills every time you block a strike, and leaves you defenseless when it’s maxed out parrying requires the strictest of timing and can only be used on certain strikes, but it completely stops an opponent’s combo dead in its tracks and leaves them dizzy swaying requires slightly less precise timing than a parry and sometimes gives you an opening for a counter attack, but doesn’t stop an enemy’s combo like a parry does and dodging simply lets you back dash or side step out of the way without giving you any sort of counter attack advantage. To that end, you have actually have a total of four unique options when it comes to defense, each with their own specific use: you can guard, parry, sway, or dodge. Most enemies you’ll need to open up by making them miss. One really important thing to note about Sifu’s combat is that it’s very defensive-oriented. Once a medallion breaks though, those upgrades are no longer achievable for that run, and once you run out of medallions on your pendant, it’s game over, and you’ll have to restart from the beginning. This pendant also is what is used to purchase upgrades, with each medallion having four to five upgrades attached to it. Your age is also tracked via a pendant with five medallions, with one medallion breaking every 10 years. But with age also comes experience, and so every time your life bar diminishes, you’ll also deal more damage. The more you age, the more frail you become, with your health bar shrinking every 10 years. Defeating certain tough enemies will allow you to reduce your death counter, but you can’t turn back the clock.
So if your death counter is at 5, and you’re 37 years old, when you revive, you’ll suddenly be 42. When you revive you’ll actually age up by whatever your death counter is at. You’ll then be able to revive right where you keeled over and get back into the fight. When you lose all of your health, your death counter will increase by one, and you’ll be able to spend your earned EXP on new moves and upgrades. In fact, dying is actually one of the main ways you’re able to become stronger. Enemies don’t give off warning signs above their head or flash different colors to let you know when they’re about to attack, the parry window on most enemy strikes is extremely tight, and they will often parry your own strikes, rarely letting you land more than two to three hits in quick succession without stunning them first.Įnemies are so tough because you’re expected to die several times in any given run through of Sifu. For one, Sifu’s battles are exceptionally difficult by design. But from those roots, it sprouts in a completely different direction.
Much of that time was spent learning the ins and outs of Sifu’s combat, which definitely has its roots in the Batman Arkham school of that one vs many, strike/counter/takedown style of combat.
But I found myself so absorbed that I’ve been continuously coming back to it in my spare time, and at this point, I’ve dumped a little over six hours into just this small slice of Sifu.
The demo that I got to play covered the Club level, which was a fairly small chunk of gameplay that – once I knew what I was doing – could be completed in just about 12-15 minutes.
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