Sifu is a slick action brawler with tight kung fu combat mechanics that’s all about revenge. It should be exactly the kind of game I get sucked into: tough but fair combat (for the most part), a gorgeous art-style and a bevy of skills to unlock and play around with.
The combat itself gives players a wonderful toolkit to work with. Well-timed parries and dodges (called Avoids) are key to besting your enemies.
A system called ‘Structure’ is very similar to ‘Posture’ in FromSoftware’s excellent Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.
As you block attacks, your Structure meter will fill. Once it fills all the way up it breaks and you become vulnerable to enemy attacks. Perfectly timed blocks, or parries, inflict Structure damage on enemies instead. Perfectly timed Avoids will remove some from the Structure meter.
It’s one of those games where the combat is fairly simple to learn but quite difficult to master.
Unfortunately, the game expertly dodges its own strengths and leans heavily into a central gimmick that makes Sifu exhausting, repetitive and tedious rather than fun and challenging.
I’m talking, of course, about the game’s ‘roguelike’ gimmick. Roguelikes (or roguelites) are games where you make “runs” upon dying where much, or all, of your progress is reset. Titles like Hades and Returnal and Dead Cells do this quite well, though I admit to having soured considerably on this genre as it’s gained popularity in recent years.
For one thing, even the best games risk player burnout. My time is precious, and repeating the same runs over and over again tries my patience. When it’s done really well, like in Hades, there’s enough permanent progression and story momentum to keep things interesting.
Titles like Dark Souls flirt a little bit with roguelike elements. You’ll repeat the same level over and over and risk losing some progression via dropped Souls. But you don’t lose all your weapons or the levels you’ve already gained, and you can often skip past many of the enemies you encounter.
Not so in Sifu. This game’s progression is complex and brutal, and starting over guarantees that you’ll fight each and every enemy on your way back to the boss a second, third or fifteenth time.
Aging & Progression In Sifu
Each time you die in Sifu, you age. You start out as a 20-year-old and after your first death you age to 21. Your second death bumps you up to 23, then 26, then 30 and so on and so forth. An extra year each death.
The concept is clever enough. As you age, your health bar decreases but your attacks get stronger. Each decade, you’re able to unlock new skills. As you progress you’ll also encounter shrines that allow you to unlock various passive abilities. There are a whole bunch of progression mechanics in Sifu. It’s a shame that most of your progression is wiped away when your run is over.
The aging mechanic has a downside: When you get too old you won’t come back to life. You’ll die for good and have to start over at the beginning. Unless you permanently unlocked any of the skills you purchased in your previous runs, they’ll be gone. You’ll start from scratch.
Permanently unlocking skills is a tedious affair that requires you to purchase the same skill several times—without actually upgrading it in the process.
Losing everything each time you age up and die means you’ll have to start over each run with only the basics at your disposal. Skills you unlocked and started playing with are gone, which means you can’t really rely on mechanics you had come to rely on in a previous run. This is confusing and frustrating.
And it just gets tiresome after a while. I have very little motivation to play the same level again and again. At least in a game like Returnal you’ll get some randomness and you can make serious headway with some of the game’s early unlocks. Here it’s just rinse and repeat, wade through all the myriad progression options, and then start over again and again.
I’m honestly just very tired of the roguelike craze and wish it would end. In the same way that open worlds can be just a lot of padding with boring fetch quests and repetitive crafting and scavenging, the repetition in a roguelike starts to feel like a stand-in for real content. I’d much rather play through more levels fewer times than fewer levels lots of times. I’d much rather simply die and return to a check-point with all my progression intact than respawn where I died but only get a limited number of lives before starting over.
Sifu is a game that simply doesn’t respect players’ time. It has some great combat mechanics to play around with but they’re buried inside a game that’s bogged down by overly complicated progression and a roguelike gimmick that adds nothing to the game.
That being said, I do like the aging mechanic and think it could still be used as an optional track for hardcore players. In Normal Mode, simply have the game function as an action game with check points and normal progression. Then have a Hardcore Mode with the aging mechanic that slowly transforms you into a glass cannon and permadeath. That way, hardcore players could get an extra challenge while everyone else could play the game and enjoy it without all the tedious repetition. Everybody wins.
Of course, I’m perfectly willing to admit that these are just my impressions and that my reaction is based on my own roguelike fatigue as much as anything. Still, I think Sloclap could do a better job with how these systems are implemented by making progression less complicated and more forgiving. Even for a roguelike, this feels overly repetitive and grindy, with too little randomness to counter all the scripted encounters. Even just integrating shortcuts into the levels (one of the Souls games’ most ingenius level-design innovations) would help make fighting your way back to a boss less exhausting.
Still, mileage will vary and fans of roguelikes may find much to enjoy. Hopefully further balancing and updates will help as well. The combat really is slick and fun and gives you lots of options to kick ass and take names, and the graphics and art-style are terrific. I just wish it wasn’t a roguelike.
Sifu comes out on February 8th on PS4, PS5 and PC (via the Epic Game Store). I played a review copy on PS5.
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