Sifu Review – The Blandmaster

On paper, Sifu should be an ideal game. It’s essentially Sleeping Dogs stripped down to its combative bare bones, it has roguelite elements within its DNA, and the quid-pro-quo nature of its magical MacGuffin adds a great risk-reward mechanic to its action. And yet, there’s something about Sifu’s gritty action that doesn’t quite work. The flow of hard-hitting punches doesn’t chain together as smoothly as you’d expect them to in this sprawling tale of revenge, leading to encounters where you feel less like a kung-fu master and more like a brawler who earned his black belt from a Verimark mail-in offer.

And that’s a shame because Sifu has so many other ideas working in its favor. A grim tale of vengeance in which the protagonist watches his family slain by a band of thugs, Sifu fast-forwards eight years into a future where you’re finally ready to enact some overdue justice. You’ve got the tools for the job: Several limbs polished in the ancient art Pak Mei kung fu and a talisman that can revive you from death. The catch here is that each death robs you of a year of your life, with the death counters increasing slowly but exponentially until your natural life is entirely spent.

Age brings wisdom and more lethal skill in taking down bands of thugs, but it also robs you of your vitality and reduces your health bar quicker than a day spent with the cast of Jackass. The aging system is a neat idea with its roguelite influence, taxing years off your lifespan with every knockdown but offering some incentive to keep on fighting. And fighting is one thing you’ll be doing plenty of.

Carl Douglas must be playing on a 24/7 loop because everyone is kung fu fighting in Sifu. Before you can enact your revenge, you’ll have to wade through mobs of goons trained in the art of fist-to-face style. You’ve got the strikes to temporarily blind them, the fists of fury to rearrange their smile bones, and kicks that can violently introduce skulls to concrete floors. This should be a walk in the park. Not exactly…

While you’ve got a handy selection of parries, blocks, and dodges to use when the goons start throwing haymakers at you, Sifu’s problem is that its challenge feels unfairly balanced. This isn’t a case of not gelling with the game’s overall toughness, but rather a janky input level where even a single wrong move will punish you with a smackdown that voids your health insurance. A one-on-one bout is fascinating, but Sifu throws multiple attacks your way and expects you to read the screen like Neo fighting a hundred Agent Smiths in The Matrix.

Sifu comes out swinging, but when you’re facing enemies who use cheap gameplay tactics to wear you down, a camera that regularly hides foes as they wind up to disrupt your combos, and you only gain a minor sliver of health back for executing challenging finishers, the fun quickly gets sucked out of the room. With a deep roguelite influence, you’ll also need to get used to running through these rooms again and again as you grind for experience points that can be used to permanently unlock several skills, artificially inflating the game’s overall runtime.

There are some shortcuts to uncover, but the game throws an extra hurdle at you by making you start each level at whatever age you completed the previous level. Which makes sense logically, but when I’ve been artificially aged to 70 by a magical death-defying talisman, I don’t care about logic. Having to dial back the experience to areas that I’d completed when I was younger, just added to the overall grind.