Sifu: Revenge is a dish best served slow

A review of Sifu (2022)

Have you ever wanted to star in your own kung-fu movie? Defending yourself against an onslaught of assassins with nothing but your own two fists? Me neither, sounds like too much pressure, but Sifu lets you act out the bare-knuckle beat-em-up without having to break a sweat (at least physically).

Released in 2022 to high praise for it’s combat mechanics, PlayStation Plus owners like myself have been bestowed the honor of challenging it’s levels for free this March.

The premise of the game is simple, but with a few unique twists.

You are the child of a martial arts Sifu (teaching father in Cantonese) and you see your father die at the hands of the skilled Yang. Fueled with a desire for revenge, your training arc (in the cleverly disguised mask of a credit sequence/actual tutorial) passes and the fight against Yang and his MMA (that’s mixed magical arts) companions begins…

Let me stop you there.

If Sifu were just another 3D fighter then that would be fine and we could all shake hands and agree on a good, but ultimately unoriginal game.

BUT

The unnamed main character has a magical pendant that revives you each time you are put to rest by a foe.

The life-giving item also takes your vitality in this macabre exchange, giving you a second, third and fourth chance (all the way up until your 70th birthday), by aging you each death.

This balancing act means the game has excellent replayability, keeping you on your toes no matter what, having to keep that deadly number as low as possible, while learning as much as you can about your opponents to survive by any means possible.

In my own opinion, this makes the game more fun than if it wasn’t a feature. The Pendant (yes, that is all it is ever called) makes you feel desperate to keep your precious youth as long as you can, meaning any sly trick like eye-poking, bottle-throwing and even crotch-punching is fair game.

Now onto the real meat of what makes Sifu a real contender at it’s core.

The combat is simply excellent, if it were a car, it would be a GT Jaguar, cool, slick and powerful without feeling cumbersome or heavy.

Similar to Ubisoft’s For Honor, you’ll find yourself waiting for your opponents to strike rather than just button-mashing your way through (though trust me I did a lot of that before I was taught a lesson).

The mechanics of Sifu reward patience and timing the most, parry an opponent’s heavy jab and you can press △○ together for an easy takedown.

Opponents can take advantage of this as well, leave yourself too open after successive strikes or keep up your guard for too long and you become an easy target to maim.

As for the story, it is simple, which is fine, but enough ties to the game’s lore found through newspaper scraps and photographs hint at themes below the surface to give at least the impression of depth.

Each level has a unique theme, but follows the same pattern. A sprawling, almost maze-like area full of goons, grunts and gang members, then a two-stage boss fight, one using only their martial prowess, and the second with the help of their magical talisman.

The unique level design, enemies and magic means that each feels fresh, and the secondary quests of exploring the levels to investigate means Sifu just begs to be 100% completed for a platinum trophy.

On the graphics, I have to add that the creators of Sifu, Sloclap Studios, must have had a mean streak. To make their environments look so beautiful (The Museum deserves special praise) but also having conditioned me to want to move through them as fast as possible is a unique psychological crime.

I mean it’s genuinely one of the best-looking games I’ve played in recent memory, the almost paper-mache style doesn’t detract from the realism, and the level of detail in areas like The Kwoon is also breathtaking.

It makes Sifu feel like a real product of love and care by the devs.

The sound design is also worth mentioning, with unique soundtracks and ambiences matching certain stages, The Club’s thumping bassline followed by the quiet, eerie echoes of The Museum makes me feel like I’m really delving into different parts of the city.

Though there are a couple spots where I do have to give my gripes, or this would be too easy of a review.

Firstly, despite our protagonist’s desire for revenge, he never says too much aside from short one-liners (around once or twice a level), and while this might just be a creative choice to give the player a better feeling of relatability to the character, it comes of as a little bland, especially since the first cutscene is so emotive and brutal.

There were also some technical issues, though not enough to impact the gameplay too much. Sometimes the frames wouldn’t have time to load in after a boss fight, and occasionally the delicate nature of the controls meant I struggled to pull off certain combos.

I do have to admit that one part of the optional tutorial, where you had to deflect, parry and then leg sweep had my flat-mate thumping on our shared wall for me to be quiet.

For my final grievance, due to the unique aging system of the game, you can’t really go back and replay levels without giving up save progress, meaning you have to start your playthrough over before playing The Squats again for example.

This isn’t too bad though, since it’s not really that long of a game anyway.

In summary, Sifu is a twin-headed dragon of beauty and violence, which requires a steady hand and calm mind to swerve the game’s uphill climb and intense difficulty.

★★★★☆

It’s four out of five stars from me, thank you for reading.