Sifu Is a Sick-as-Hell Kung Fu Revenge Story with a Cool Mechanical Hook
Sifu absolutely whips.
It’s been clear from day one that Sifu was an effort to build something that lasts. Sloclap’s last game, Absolver—a persistent online fighting game where you could create your own fighting styles from several others—was nothing if not ambitious. It just didn’t have the legs to stand for as long as it’s been. Sifu has always looked like a different beast though, an assessment I’m only more confident in after finally being able to play a short preview of it.
Sifu is another fighting game, much like the studio’s previous effort, but a dozen times more laser-focused. The multiplayer is gone and the multiple fighting styles with it. Instead, Sifu is a kung fu revenge flick of a game. Driven by the desire to right the murder of his family, Sifu’s protagonist seems to begin the game as a young man on a war path in search of their assassins. In his wake, he leaves countless bodies, probably some shattered bones, and at least a broken table or two. It’s here, where the game dresses itself in the garbs of martial arts and revenge movies, that it’s most compelling.
Sifu almost instantly feels, and I hate saying it, cinematic. Its reveal trailer hones in on a fight in a hallway, instantly invoking Oldboy’s most famous and now iconic scene, which was then adapted to death by western cinema to some success and some failures. Every intricately choreographed motion you make is animated fluidly and every blow that lands sounds 10 times harder than it should, adding to the drama. By the time I was done, the nightclub level I played through looked as torn up as a set at the end of an exhaustive, but thrilling, action sequence. The best part: Like most great action films, Sifu knows you’re here for the action, letting precious few bits of dialogue stand between you and the next fight.
The level available in the preview, The Club, is the perfect distillation of the game’s eagerness to be an ode to action’s cinematic tropes; it’s a fantasy straight out of an action flick, perhaps most recently from the popular John Wick films. Beginning on the street just outside, you immediately launch into a fight with the bouncer at the front before ruining the days of every single person standing between you and the target you’ve tracked back here. You beat the crap out of the coat check, the sleazy guys by the door and the first mini-boss on the dance floor before making your way to the actual fight club in the back. But in that sweet middle, you hear the bass pounding, see the panels on the dance floor light up and get to look incredible as you’re transported to a scene not unlike one you were likely enthralled by on the big screen.
This is obviously due in large part to the fluid kung fu combat of the game. There’s no lock-on feature, meaning combos of fists and feet will fly freely and connect with your opponents or not. You know, like a real fight. A simple list of strings at the pause menu give some early pointers, like leg sweeps, and signal that you will learn more techniques to layer atop one another throughout the course of the game. These skills, as well as a separate upgrade menu (for passives like increased health gain from takedowns), can be upgraded at the odd statue or upon death. Some of these upgrades seemed more meaningful than others, while the skill tree pointed to a progression system I’m a little mixed on.
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