You can only weather a few full-on baseball bats to the chin, like some kind of wuss.ĭefeating enemies will yield XP with which you can unlock skills such as new combos, ground counters, and Focus moves. And for a badass, you’re surprisingly squishy. Attempting to button mash is pointless, as enemies will simply break your combos, and holding guard and backing off all the time will invite them slap your face off with a big flaming guard-break and go to town on your kidneys for a bit. It’s a game about dodging, countering, keeping your distance and waiting for moments of opportunity. Up until now you’ve been swatting goons away like flies now you’re facing an equal and you need to treat the fight this way.Ĭombat in Sifu most resembles Sekiro, of all the aforementioned Soulslikes. But this is how Sifu both punishes and teaches: now it doesn’t want you to smash through the problem. He comes at you like Yoda at the end of Attack of the Clones and pressing the attack is the natural thing to do because that’s what you’ve been doing for the whole game so far. You’re still picking bits of eyeball out of your laces by the time you reach the boss – and this itself is the issue. A wonderful set piece in a corridor full of goons evokes a handful of classic cinematic fights and leaves you feeling like a badass. Up until that first boss, enemies are fairly easily despatched. But this isn’t simply a case of “gitting gud”. I was stuck on the first guy, The Botanist, for several hours I’m not ashamed to say. The boss fights in Sifu are multi-phase contests and genuinely hard until you get the hang of the mechanics. Stages involve you throat-punching and ball-smashing your way to the final confrontation, at which point you’ll usually have your arse handed to you on a plate a few times. Your task is find and defeat the crew of martial arts nutcases who ruined your life, and each sits atop their own mini empire under the gaze of a powerful matriarch. Enemies don’t respawn when you die, you just have to restart the stage, but there are shortcuts to be found in each area that make the run back to the boss just a little less punishing. It borrows a few elements from the Soulslike genre, although it doesn’t have the credentials for full membership of that particular club. It wouldn’t be so bad, but there’s just not much reason to go back other than this. This, frankly, needs changing, as it makes the late game an almost impossible task unless you intentionally replay previous stages just to reduce your age. So if you limp to victory at 75, good luck surviving with just one “life” in the next stage. Also, when you finish one stage, you’re locked to the age you are when you beat it. And this will happen, by the way, quite a bit. It’s possible to go from 20 to 77 and die of old age in a single fight. However, a magical talisman allows you to rise again and keep rising, until your vengeance is sated.Ī rather naff drawback is that every time you die, you age by a number of years concurrent with how many times you’ve fallen. After witnessing the betrayal first hand, your character is apparently slain. Your character’s father was a sifu in the Pak Mei discipline of kung fu, betrayed by his former students. The story is almost refreshing in its simplicity. We wouldn’t though: that’s how you lose a tooth. If the combat is a pool, the rest of Sifu is the greasy linoleum that surrounds it that you’re tempted to run across to get to the good stuff. And while the combat certainly has plenty of depth, the game that frames it doesn’t. Of course, such a tight focus can have its drawbacks.įor example, Sifu scatters collectibles about its stages, some of which inform the story or open up shortcuts, but they don’t often take long to find. It’s a game about punching people in the face, throat, and balls over and over again, and we’re absolutely here for it. Sifu isn’t a game about finding the best loot, about levelling up and exploring a massive wilderness. Sifu, from indie studio sloclap, aims to slide into that niche, and largely succeeds. In these days of the vast open world sandbox where everything has looting and shooting and RPG elements, there’s little pure action to go around. There are very few games released these days that aim to do just one thing well.
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