I knew I'd love this game from the moment I saw it. I was intrigued by the aging by death mechanic, as well as the first trailer actually revealing gameplay right away that looked like it was right up my alley. So for Sifu to finally come out on Steam and being able to play it has been a dream come true. It has surpassed my expectations and I highly highly recommend this game for the following reasons:

The most important and impressive aspect of this game is its gameplay, which is weird to say, but needs to be stated in this world of 100 hour open world campaigns with even 100 more hours of cutscenes to sit through. This game sets up its premise rather quickly by letting you learn the basic controls through the prologue that doubles duty as a tutorial for its complex combat mechanics.

This is probably one of the most robust system I've played so far where not only do you have to learn a huge variety of moves and string them together into combos, but you also gotta learn how to use proper defense such as spacing, blocking, and parrying. In addition, you also have a typical dodge as you'd fight in any other brawler, though that's more used for spacing where the real meat of the dense is the Parry and Avoid system.

You COULD just block attacks, but doing that for too long will break your Structure, leaving you defenseless and open for huge attacks. What you wanna do more of is Parrying enemy attacks to break THEIR structures or at the very least, the cool looking Avoiding of High and Low attacks which leaves your character bobbing and weaving their head around to avoid head kicks and sweeps.

This is one of those games where it's easy to learn, but very hard to master, and while what they give you from the outset is already such a robust moveset, you can add to your repertoire by unlocking new skills that all have a huge variety of uses ranging from more crowd control to more efficient damage and more.

To add to the game's combat is probably one of the best collision systems I've seen in a game where you can push your enemies into each other, even trip them over each other, AND you can make them accidentally hurt each other like if one is swinging a bat at you, and if you duck at the right time, they could end up hitting their own pals so that's always fun!

The limitless possibilities leave for a very dynamic experience in every fight you get into which can provide a ton of replay value. A lot of people bemoan that you can beat this game in 6 hours and if they just wanna be done with games that way, that's fine, you do you. If you don't think $40 is worth 6 hours of your time, then that's fine. But I would argue that to get the best out of this game is to replay its well structured 5 levels continuously learning new moves and tactics as you do, all the while experimenting with different buffs per run.

Yes, per "run."

You see, this game is also a bit of a rogue lite where you can buy certain skills for a run if you need them, but you need to buy them five times if you wanna unlock them permanently for your next run. And for each run you can also choose from a variety of buffs ranging from regaining more health per Takedown and recovering Structure health from Avoiding attacks.

So all in all it's the kinda game that the more you put into it the more you get out of it. Zipping through it in 6 hours is barely even scratching the surface of this game, and hey props to you if you can do it. But the fun in this game is learning how to do those 6 hours more efficiently, maybe even cut it down and some unlocked shortcuts throughout each level.

Yeah, the focus is on combat, but there's some minor exploration as you can get lore notes and keys to certain areas from one level for another which also adds to the replay value and possible speedrunning challenges.

To top this all of there's also a built in video editor where you can record your base gameplay and then apply different camera angles and effects to your fights to create some truly cinematic looking action. There's a lot of YouTubers out there actually who have made super entertaining short kung fu films because of this, myself included, and to be honest, at least 40 of my 60 hours on this game so far have been spent on the video editor.

Anyways I've been going on and on, let's just that the TL;DR version of this is...

A gang of martial artists have killed your father and you've spent eight years training for your revenge. As you hunt them down, if you happen to die, you revive and get older. The older you get, the harder you hit, but the less health you have. Pretty simple excuse for getting to beat up a bunch of people in a variety of different settings from the slums to a high class museum.

Anyways, there's not much to say other than the dialogue is thankfully sparse, though I wish there was just a bit more. My usual gripe with modern games is that the characters just don't STFU and keep talking endlessly about nothing before any actual plot point is made. This game is too straight forward to a fault and could have built on its characters a bit more.

But at the same time, as I mentioned, you can unlock lore related items that tell you a bit about the characters and a lot of their backstories are implied from their very own levels, lore notes, and even their sparse dialogue. Probably a breath of fresh air I really need in a day in age where I feel annoyed with cutscenes that go on forever.


The artstyle is awesome and while there is some clipping and wonky paired animations, the stand out feature of this is the animations that nailed some great accuracy with various martial art styles and hit reactions that really sell the action. Not to mention, the level design is just immaculate giving so much character to the end level bosses you're swearing your revenge on.


Unfortunately though, as good as the animations sell certain attacks, the sound effects that go with most of them do not feel impactful enough to truly sell them. They just sound like very light slaps instead of really punchy with a lot of bass and treble to emphasize the impact. Plus the music is more so serviceable for the situations, but not entirely memorable.

So with the great IGN level of math skills, I give this game an...

Despite the flaws in its sound design and animation processing, the gameplay really really makes up for where the game lacks in other areas. It really is super solid and addicting and I see myself quadrupling my current amount of hours in no time.

This is the kind of complex fighting game I've wanted for a long time and I am eternally grateful that Slocap has made this game. It's literally everything I've wanted and more, and while I would have preferred a more closed fist fighting style to feature as the one you use, it's a minor gripe. It doesn't matter at this point. This game is just too damn fun to really nitpick apart for dumb little things like I did with its sound design and story scores.

The gameplay is too addicting and the video editor is such a great addition that I have gotten myself lost for many hours since release just finding ways to make the action look as epic as possible with a variety of different character mods from Daredevil to Desmond Miles. Ah yes...that's where the fun can continue as well...the modding community really helps keep this game even more alive and applying mods for this game is so simple.

Anyways, why are you still reading this long winded review? Go buy the game already if any of this intices you!