At its best, Sifu has the goofy grace of a playable Jackie Chan movie
Sloclap’s fast-moving kung-fu game has its flaws, but its cinematic ambitions are hard to resist
Games Reviews Sifu
The key moment to understanding Sifu, the glossy new martial arts game from Absolver developer Sloclap, arrives about 15 minutes into the game’s story of kick-and-punch-based vengeance. That’s when your player character barges into a hallway in a rundown tenement, only to see a dozen or so goons arrayed along its length, primed for murder. With a certain inevitability, the game’s camera quietly slides from behind your hero’s back and into a mid-distance side shot. The baddies rush. And you (hopefully) proceed to systematically dismantle them in a display of bravura hand-to-hand violence.
All that’s really missing is the hammer.
Not that Park Chan-Wook’s is the only filmography Sloclap is cribbing from here; Kill Bill, for instance, is baked right into Sifu’s structure, down to a list of comic book-ish assassins that slowly gets crossed out as you progress through its simple story of a child seeking revenge on their parent’s killers. And that’s to say nothing of god knows how many more authentic kung-fu movies the game lifts its various fights, locales, and moves from.
At its best, Sifu manages to accurately replicate the high-energy, tightly choreographed grace of those classics, going full old-school Jackie Chan with its improvised broom combat and casually hurled bottles into mooks’ faces. There’s a powerful high that comes from ducking under an enemy’s kicks in the middle of a crowded club, knocking their feet out from under them with a quickly propelled footstool, and then proceeding to pound them into paste. Or getting knocked back through a table in a secretive drug lab, grabbing a broken piece of furniture as a weapon, and rallying a high-speed counter-offensive. As the game teaches you to scale its increasingly brutal learning curve, it only becomes a better and better action movie, transforming from the blunders of “Guy Who Keeps Getting Smacked In The Back Of The Head By Low Level Thugs” into something much more flowing and balletic.
That difficulty is aided (sometimes overly so) by the game’s strangest system: A mystical amulet that brings your hero back to life every time they die, at the cost of them being aged an increasing number of years with every revival. A particularly bad fight—and you will have some particularly bad fights, especially before you’ve learned how to manage the game’s vital defensive move set—can see your nameless protagonist age 40 years in a single bout. (Hilariously, no one ever comments on the fact that they guy they’re fighting just sprouted a foot-long gray beard and crow’s feet over the course of a five-minute battle.)
The metaphor is simple and a little dumb, in a way that kind of works: Your protagonist literally spends years of his or her life in pursuit of vengeance. The mechanical effect, meanwhile, is strictly poor-get-poorer: Every decade of life increases the damage you take and shortens your health bar, while also cutting down on upgrade options. Reach 70, and the amulet breaks outright; die then, and you’ll be restarting from your last uncompleted stage. (Or earlier, if you want to replay levels to try to beat them at a lower age; there’s a lot of arcade energy baked into Sifu’s structure.) The idea is to impose a sense of desperation, as you push to beat one more boss or unlock one more permanent shortcut before your body finally gives out. The effect, though, is often to instill a sense of despair and frustration.
Because Sifu, in case it wasn’t clear, is damn hard. The weakest enemies go down easily, but anyone beefier will require a blend of reaction time, watchfulness, and upgrades (which only persist between lives if you pay a healthy multiple of their experience cost to make them permanent). It’s the price of replicating that movie magic mastery, and of taking the game’s combat beyond that of a more simple brawler: Taking a lot of lumps learning how to dodge, parry, or otherwise avoid attacks often dispensed at lightning speed. At times, it’s strangely reminiscent of From Software’s Sekiro, with its similar focus on using your defensive skillset as a form of offensive attack. But that game was rarely, if ever, this unforgiving, or as willing to chip away at your precious resources with every death.
Is it worth the effort? Like we said: The highs here are very high, the sense of potential mastery potent. (Game looks great, too, with a fluid, slightly cartoonish style.) But progress will take a certain bloody-minded persistence—and a willingness to overlook the game’s various crimes against authenticity. (To be clear: This is a team of French developers making a video game about what they think an Asian martial arts movie looks like; it’s so divorced from anything resembling a story about real people or cultures as to land somewhere at the intersection of stereotype and cliché.) With those caveats in mind, though, Sifu remains the kind of game it’s hard to stay away from for very long—for no other reason than a desire to take vengeance on it for what it did to you the last time you played.
Update, 5:44 p.m. on 2/6/22: Sifu’s PR team reached out with a statement today in response to this review; we’re printing it in its entirety here for the sake of transparency:
1. The game is not about Asian martial arts, it’s specifically about Chinese Pak Mei Kung Fu. The region of Asia covers a lot of countries that may have different fighting styles vs the Chinese Kung Fu styles, and this is specifically about one style, Pak Mei.
2. The team employed a number of Chinese development consultants through their partners at Kowloon Nights. The feedback from the Chinese developers touched on topics from character animation, narrative, character design, environmental design, and the combat choreographer, Benjamin Colussi is a master at Pak Mei, who lived in Foshan and studied as Lao Wei San’s chosen disciple. He is considered the heir to Pak Mei Kung Fu.
28 Comments
Oh, they made Absolver! A very cool looking game that was also well past my personal threshold of learning that I passed on. I uh…am also passing on Sifu for a while because I should limit purchasing a new game I probably won’t finish to once in a while, and I’m opting for Horizon Zero Dawn.Perhaps appropiately considering the Awkwafina article going the rounds, but Sifu seems earnest and upfront, and me, I think “authentic” is an adjective but not a credential of itself.Gotta ask, is “defensive verb” the way the game organizes itself or new to me game review terminology? I kind of get it/feel it’s kinda opaque.
Breaking games down into each one’s set of verbs has been something I’ve seen more and with in games criticism. It’s an opaque way to describe things but once you understand it as a framing mechanism, it begins to make more sense
That seems like a hole with no bottom – Are there also attack verbs, progress verbs, and context verbs?Like once they start going down that road, why bother to get specific about anything in the game at all?
I watched the IGN review of the game, and in that the reviewer talked about the emphasis of the game on learning the counters and parries opening up the combat options more so than the unlocking more attacks necessarily might. In that vein, I think that’s what Hughes is saying when talking about Sifu’s defensive verbs, though he’s more descriptive in the second instance. So presumably there are all those other things—attack verbs, progress verbs, etc… as they describe action/gameplay options. The verbiage (heh) is a touch more jargony and obscuring to me than clarifying for me though, obviously.
Unfortunately, those of us on PlayStation are unable to comment as those of us who ordered the 48 hour Early Access Deluxe Edition are unable to download the game. As I’m writing this, it’s been 5 hours since we were SUPPOSED to be able to play the game. No matter how good the game may be, this type of “glitch” is unforgivable and @sloclap’s and @sifugame’s Twitter feeds are showing the frustration.
Absolver was a mesh of good ideas that didn’t equal up to a cohesive whole. But I’ll probably be buying this just because it looks damn cool and I want to see if I can beat it before Forbidden West.
Harder than Sekiro is not a selling point for my old ass.
Same. I saw some game play of it and decided “Nope, this over 50 gamer is not going to mess with that”I’ll just watch the young folks play it instead.
Is the review talking about “a guy” who “sprouts a beard when aging” and then following that up with a female pronoun just yet more evidence of the low standards of this group of websites when it comes to editing? Or the epitome of stupid wokeness?
Yeah , its a bit confusing
Occam’s Razor suggests character creation has males and females and that the author was having a little fun with their verbiage.
You can play as both a male and female character.
Which still doesn’t answer the question. Mixing pronouns like this is messy and it’s either specifically designed to show how woke this site is (God forbid you pick one and stick with it, or even go a very simple he/she/they) or just how lacking in editing standards the whole operation has gotten. Switching from one to another is not fun and it’s not progressive. It’s simply bad writing.
Even if this was a valid point, it feels like an unnecessarily cruel one to make. Especially since many writers on this site are going to be out of a job in a few weeks.
Curious – how do you define ‘stupid wokeness’? How do you define ‘non-stupid wokeness’? Or just ‘woke’?
It’s a shame this looks so tough, good and fun martial arts games are a surprising niche in games.It’s one of the (many) things Sleeping Dogs nailed – that balance between needing concentration and skill whilst also feeling like an utter badass
I have that game and keep putting off playing it.
Perhaps it’s time to do it again..
That response is a pretty funny and fierce counter to the offhand “this is probably racist but I did no research” ending of the review.
Yeah, I was and still am confused by the ending of the review. What is the point the author is trying to make here ? I’m a martial artist that watched a lot of martial arts movies and while I’ve only went as far as half the second part of the game, I’ve already seen a few winks at existing martial arts movie. As for the move, I can def. tell that they are way more close to real life that what we could see in Shang-Chi.
In fairness, it doesn’t actually address criticisms regarding how well represented the culture is as such. It counters/evidences that the martial arts is researched/represented, but doesn’t really respond to culture/story aspects in any detail beyond that it was ‘touched on’. Not having played it yet, I couldn’t comment anyways. Just a note/thought tho.
The problem is said criticisms are poorly defined in the article and lacking any real substance. Besides I think it’s more in response to the comment that the developers are French and the implication that this is why it’s supposedly lacking in authenticity. It’s a cheap dig and considering the author of the article is a white American I’m not sure why he thinks he’s more of an expert.
Oh, absolutely. Trying to play devil’s advocate more than specifically agree.
One thing that did disappoint me though, separate from this, was that the game seems to only have English voice acting (which is odd, as I’d read elsewhere they had Chinese voice actors – as in language, not nationality)?
They kinda deserved it really with the insinuation that they didn’t know how to make it authentic not because they didn’t do research but because they’re French. Because the white American author of this article is clearly more of an expert.
Saying “we had a martial arts consultant” doesn’t contradict the reviewer’s assessment that the game’s story is derivative and inauthentic. But it sure does make the developers look thin-skinned.
Saying “we had a martial arts consultant” doesn’t contradict the reviewer’s assessment that the game’s story is derivative and inauthentic. But it sure does make the developers look thin-skinned.
From what I’ve seen it looks like a good time. Is it full price though? I’d pay 20 for it.
I’m extremely interested in playing this, but I also hear there’s a lot of repeatedly sitting through the same prolonged cut scenes, which .. is like being offered a spectacular ice cream sundae that unfortunately also has a small dog turd in it.
I think you’re mistaken about the aging – your damage INCREASES (not damage taken) at the cost of shorter life bar