In these moments, Sifu shines, presenting more like a Jackie Chan movie with excellent choreography and perfect framing. It truly feels rewarding to be continuously beaten down by your enemies, only to return later to lay the beatdown on them as you predict their every move and react accordingly. This means that after a few runs of certain levels you will have a good idea of what attacks might come your way and how best to deal with them. Run-of-the-mill enemies have a variety of movesets, but after a while you will start to notice that enemies that have the same physical build will use the same types of attacks.
You can often dispatch weaker enemies with a combo and a well-timed counter, but stronger enemies may require consecutive parries and a wise use of your attack window after. Your combo list is limited at the start of the game, but you can expand it through the use of XP as you progress. Being able to feel the impact of your attacks is something I value in just about every game I play and Sifu does a great job of selling the blows. Every hit feels substantial and weighty, and the damage feedback feels great here. Chaining together light and heavy attacks allows you to deal substantial damage to your enemies, while also breaking their posture. While the controls are easy enough to dive into, with there only being two attack buttons, a counter/parry button, and a dodge, the difficulty lies in finding out when to use each tool at your disposal.
Sifu’s combat is surprisingly simple for a game that focuses primarily on that and that alone, but simple does not mean dull. What you’re really here for is its combat. At the end of the day, you aren’t going to be playing Sifu for its groundbreaking story, and the developers know that. This does lead you to question whether the villains’ motivations could have been less sympathetic at one point, but at the same time everyone else seems pretty hellbent on your demise anyways. The core gameplay is good enough that you never worry too much about the morality of your actions, and while the story does hint at some inner conflict, it never capitalizes on it. Sifu does have a bit more to offer storywise than avenging your master’s death, but it never goes too deep with the questions it asks you, and it never has to. Really, all we need is that first excuse to go down a violent and bloody path of revenge, and we are all set. As we all know from movies like John Wick, revenge is sometimes all you need to get behind a protagonist in media like this. Sifu is a game centered around a tale of revenge. It delivered on its promises to offer some of the best hand-to-hand combat seen in the genre for some time, create compelling levels that are a joy to dive back into for collectibles and secrets, and, most importantly, give players the feeling of being a complete kung-fu wielding badass. Now that I have spent around 15 hours with the game and rolled credits, I am happy to say that Sifu did not disappoint. A game that blended stylish kung-fu gameplay with deep fighting mechanics and a unique take on the roguelite genre sounded right up my alley at the time. When I saw Sifu for the first time, I knew I had to play it.
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