Sifu was an interesting game when it was announced at one of Sony's State of Play events last year. It looked like the video game version of a Jackie Chan movie or that crazy martial arts film The Raid. The character was kicking peoke off balconies, bashing their faces into sinks, kicking out their knees, all kinds of crazy Kung Fu shit. The real challenge would be to translate that into actual gameplay and make it feel good.
Sifu almost completely gets there. The offensive combat feels great, when you are beating someone's lights out it looks incredible it feels incredible and it's totally awesome. The character feels responsive to your inputs which I think is very very key to a game like this. You have a light attack, heavy attack, dodge, block, pick up weapon button, all the basic stuff you'd expect. You beat the crap out of people until they run out of health OR their stagger bar breaks where you can then execute a flashy takedown move on then which will restore your health and since you don't want to die you wanna takedown as many people as possible. It really great fun and feels really good to pull off especially with the sheer variety of animations on display here.
Where Sifu falters for me however is that your defensive options feel really inconsistant. Blocking works omnidirectionally so no matter where an attack is coming from you'll block it. However there is a stagger gauge in much the same way that Sekiro had a stagger meter. The more you block or take big hits (like with a bat) the more this meter goes up and if your stagger is broken then you stagger briefly which is absolutely no big deal. The problem with blocking/parrying is two fold. Number 1 the block doesn't seem to work until the character finishes the animation of putting his hands up, which means you can be hit as you block which will prevent you from blocking anything. This is frustrating because it means once you are getting combo'ed you are basically going to eat the whole fucking thing. Number 2 the parry window is so fucking tight, parrying might as well not even be there. If you hit the block button right as an attack hits you, you will parry and stagger the enemy. I've never been able to parry on purpose, much less parry two attacks in a row (say two enemies attacking at once) which meant after a couple of bullshit deaths I never bothered to try an parry again. At least in the two hours I played.
The defensive issue is a big problem because this isn't a movie game where the bad guys line up and wait for you to fight them one by one. No they gang up on you and come at you from all sides at all times. So not having a reliable reflexive block is a problem for me. The other issue is that you die EXTREMELY quickly. If you get caught by a dude with a bat, you are dead, period. Sifu is a game that very much requires the player to be perfect and I mean PERFECT. Any mistake can be fatal which leads me to talking about the death system.
The way death works in the game is every time you die, you get back up and age by a set amount. For example you start at age 20, die once, then you go to 21. Each death adds a counter to it. So if you die again your counter goes from 1 to 2, and you age two years. Then again the counter goes to 3 and you age 3 years and up and up and up. If you kill certain enemies you can reduce the death counter which will lower the amount of years you age each death but it will not reset your age. You have until you are 75 to beat the 5 stages of the game. If you fail, that's GG homie.
Sifu doesn't fuck around. Sifu means Master and damn does it expect you to master it. That fact alone will turn people away because I don't see very many people being able to play Sifu casually without putting some effort into getting pretty damn good at the combat.
Every time you beat a level the game bookmarks what age you were at that level. So if you beat stage 1 at age 25 then you will always be able to start level 2 at 25 (or you can start the whole game over at level 1 at age 20 and try to do better). Because there are only 5 levels in the game, the idea is to "master" each stage to beat it as young as you possible can. This gives you enough deaths to learn each new level as you progress.
The game isn't a rogue-like exactly though. As you don't really keep anything you learn skill/stat wise from attempt to attempt, but it doesn't really matter than much because you also don't completely lose your progress anyway as you only have to deal with the age mechanic. The best way to play through the game is to not even worry about the age, just playthrough the level as best you can learning how everything goes along the way. After you finish the level (or die at 75 years old) replay it again until you beat it at a decent age before moving onto the next stage and doing it all over again.
There is a skill tree that you can unlock a few attacks and such along the way, that if you save up EXP to invext in the same skill 6 times, you then unlock that skill forever. This means that there is litterally no point in ever buying a skill unless you can perminately unlock it, because you don't loose your exp if you totally die at 75, and can then buy the skill forever when you load back into your home. Eventually you'll have every skill unlocked forever and it wont matter.
Finally there are shrines you can find to buff yourself during each level. These do things like increase your stagger meter, increase health gain from taking enemies down, etc etc. As far as I can tell these shrines only work within each stage and do not carry over through replays or new levels.
Sifu almost completely gets there. The offensive combat feels great, when you are beating someone's lights out it looks incredible it feels incredible and it's totally awesome. The character feels responsive to your inputs which I think is very very key to a game like this. You have a light attack, heavy attack, dodge, block, pick up weapon button, all the basic stuff you'd expect. You beat the crap out of people until they run out of health OR their stagger bar breaks where you can then execute a flashy takedown move on then which will restore your health and since you don't want to die you wanna takedown as many people as possible. It really great fun and feels really good to pull off especially with the sheer variety of animations on display here.
Where Sifu falters for me however is that your defensive options feel really inconsistant. Blocking works omnidirectionally so no matter where an attack is coming from you'll block it. However there is a stagger gauge in much the same way that Sekiro had a stagger meter. The more you block or take big hits (like with a bat) the more this meter goes up and if your stagger is broken then you stagger briefly which is absolutely no big deal. The problem with blocking/parrying is two fold. Number 1 the block doesn't seem to work until the character finishes the animation of putting his hands up, which means you can be hit as you block which will prevent you from blocking anything. This is frustrating because it means once you are getting combo'ed you are basically going to eat the whole fucking thing. Number 2 the parry window is so fucking tight, parrying might as well not even be there. If you hit the block button right as an attack hits you, you will parry and stagger the enemy. I've never been able to parry on purpose, much less parry two attacks in a row (say two enemies attacking at once) which meant after a couple of bullshit deaths I never bothered to try an parry again. At least in the two hours I played.
The defensive issue is a big problem because this isn't a movie game where the bad guys line up and wait for you to fight them one by one. No they gang up on you and come at you from all sides at all times. So not having a reliable reflexive block is a problem for me. The other issue is that you die EXTREMELY quickly. If you get caught by a dude with a bat, you are dead, period. Sifu is a game that very much requires the player to be perfect and I mean PERFECT. Any mistake can be fatal which leads me to talking about the death system.
The way death works in the game is every time you die, you get back up and age by a set amount. For example you start at age 20, die once, then you go to 21. Each death adds a counter to it. So if you die again your counter goes from 1 to 2, and you age two years. Then again the counter goes to 3 and you age 3 years and up and up and up. If you kill certain enemies you can reduce the death counter which will lower the amount of years you age each death but it will not reset your age. You have until you are 75 to beat the 5 stages of the game. If you fail, that's GG homie.
Sifu doesn't fuck around. Sifu means Master and damn does it expect you to master it. That fact alone will turn people away because I don't see very many people being able to play Sifu casually without putting some effort into getting pretty damn good at the combat.
Every time you beat a level the game bookmarks what age you were at that level. So if you beat stage 1 at age 25 then you will always be able to start level 2 at 25 (or you can start the whole game over at level 1 at age 20 and try to do better). Because there are only 5 levels in the game, the idea is to "master" each stage to beat it as young as you possible can. This gives you enough deaths to learn each new level as you progress.
The game isn't a rogue-like exactly though. As you don't really keep anything you learn skill/stat wise from attempt to attempt, but it doesn't really matter than much because you also don't completely lose your progress anyway as you only have to deal with the age mechanic. The best way to play through the game is to not even worry about the age, just playthrough the level as best you can learning how everything goes along the way. After you finish the level (or die at 75 years old) replay it again until you beat it at a decent age before moving onto the next stage and doing it all over again.
There is a skill tree that you can unlock a few attacks and such along the way, that if you save up EXP to invext in the same skill 6 times, you then unlock that skill forever. This means that there is litterally no point in ever buying a skill unless you can perminately unlock it, because you don't loose your exp if you totally die at 75, and can then buy the skill forever when you load back into your home. Eventually you'll have every skill unlocked forever and it wont matter.
Finally there are shrines you can find to buff yourself during each level. These do things like increase your stagger meter, increase health gain from taking enemies down, etc etc. As far as I can tell these shrines only work within each stage and do not carry over through replays or new levels.
