PSA: Sifu Might Not Be The Game You Think It Is
If you wanna be Jet Li, you’re gonna have to earn it.
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I went into Sifu expecting a Jet Li simulator that would make me feel like the greatest martial artist who ever lived. What I got instead was my ass almost immediately handed to me. This is a game about mastery in a very literal sense. Mirroring the decades-long quest for vengeance, and diligent training, of the main character, you need time and patience to get the best out of it.
You’re going to die, repeatedly and unceremoniously. Death is hard-coded into the game’s DNA. It’s designed around it. Sifu comes from a school of game design that asks you to bang your head against a brick wall, over and over again, until you manage to beat the odds and smash through it. Your head might be bloodied and bruised, but you’ll be satisfied that you managed it in the end.
This is a game you simply cannot play casually. If you go through it aggressively spamming attacks, you might scrape through a few battles. But eventually, inevitably, you’ll hit a point where you can no longer make any meaningful progress. For some of you, that probably sounds ideal. A lot of gamers will relish a hefty challenge like this. But it will also put a lot of people off.
To finish Sifu you have to, in the parlance of our times, get good. There’s no way around it. There’s a wealth of moves in the game, tailored to countless different combat situations, and you need to learn a good chunk of them. You also have to pay close attention to how enemies move—particularly the bosses, who are absolutely relentless. Give them an inch and they will destroy you.
It can be a Jet Li simulator, and the combat is magnificent when it clicks and you manage to clear a roomful of bad guys without taking a single hit. That’s when Sifu comes into its own, and the promise of the trailers comes thrillingly true. But getting to that point involves actual work, and for anyone who lacks time or patience, that’s gonna be a big ask. Sifu just isn’t for everyone.
It’s not really a roguelike either, so you can’t just keep banging your noggin against that wall until you’ve gained enough strength to breeze through it. Deaths are tracked and added to your age every time your health drops to zero. You might start a level aged 25, and end it at 37 with streaks of grey in your beard. If you reach the ripe old age of 75, you die and have to start over.
You can restart a level, but only from the age you were when you first reached it. When you’re older your health decreases, but your strength increases, which gives you a bit of an edge—but not much. You can also permanently unlock moves by spending large amounts of XP, but it’s an expensive investment. Even when Sifu is ostensibly helping you, it does it at arm’s length.
I can already smell a discourse brewing. Is Sifu too difficult? Should it have an easy mode so more people can enjoy it? It’s been 12 minutes since the last Twitter difficulty argument, so we’re due another. Something similar to Hades’ God Mode might work, increasing your defence after every death. It’ll be interesting to see how, or if, the developer reacts to the inevitable debate.
So be careful. If you watched those stylish trailers and pictured yourself effortlessly kicking and punching your way through large groups of enemies like Jackie Chan, Sifu might be a shock to the system. If you want to feel like that, you have to earn it. Vertigo-inducing difficulty curve aside, this is some of the best looking, best feeling martial arts I’ve experienced in a video game.
Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/sifu-difficulty/