Sifu is a kung fu-fueled beat ‘em up from developer Sloclap, the studio behind Absolver. Unlike that multiplayer martial arts game, the company’s newest title is a singleplayer affair that follows a student seeking vengeance against the five martial arts masters who wronged him and his family. At a glance, the upcoming, $39.99 PC game looks like it leverages Absolver’s combat, but the gameplay mechanics are streamlined to be simpler, and overall closer to the PlayStation 2 classic, God Hand. Our time with the Sifu demo revealed a few problems that we hope to see addressed before the game’s February 2022 launch, including frame rate instability, latency, and crashing. Still, Sifu’s gameplay foundation is solid, and rife with potential.
The Greatest Form of Flattery
Capcom’s God Hand was a flawed masterpiece that featured superb fighting, an absurd plot, and the goofiest cast of characters in any action game. In particular, the game’s bob/weave evasion technique, customizable combos, and intuitive controls gave the brutal, punishing combat a satisfying uniqueness that appealed to the few people who played it. Sloclap clearly had an affinity for God Hand, as Sifu feels heavily inspired by it in many ways.
As mentioned, the protagonist is hunting for a group of traitorous martial artists who betrayed his family and dojo. The story appears to be a standard revenge plot, but you can check out a whiteboard in the game menu to see the detective-like connections the protagonist makes to track his targets. This board gives you the backstory and character motivations without bogging down the game with excess story scenes or dialogue. In fact, the Sifu demo is surprisingly minimalistic in all the right ways; there are no hard cuts to event scenes or lengthy pre-combat diatribes. Everything you need to know about the game world is presented in-game. It’s our hope that the full release retains this presentation.
Your fists do most of the talking, in any case. You use the directional buttons to ask specific NPCs questions, but you can just as easily crack them in the jaw with a bottle if you don’t care to hear what they have to say. You are on a quest for revenge, after all, and there are a lot of punching bags in between you and your targets.
Slice of the Action
Sifu uses a two-button combo system, with one button dedicated to light strikes, and another dedicated to blows. Combining these two buttons in various ways results in different attacks, though the demo we played through was somewhat limited in this regard. There are also a few special attacks that mix up your assault. For example, tapping the directional keys/stick back, then forward, followed by a light attack results in a palm strike that shoves your target, and opens up space. The same input with a heavy attack initiates a sweep that drops weakened opponents onto the floor.
Besides health and damage, you need to manage Structure during scuffles. Structure is a mechanic akin to the posture system in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Essentially, as you deal damage to opponents, you also weaken their posture, which is represented by a yellow gauge beneath their health bars. When this gauge completely fills, the opponents’ stances are broken, leaving them stunned and vulnerable to a powerful finishing blow. The same is true for you, too. If you block too many consecutive blows, your Structure weakens and eventually breaks, leaving you wide open to receive an enemy’s attack.
Ironclad Defense
You can parry or block on the defensive side. Tapping the block button parries incoming blows, while holding block initiates a guard. There are advantages and disadvantages to both techniques. Parries interrupt enemy attacks, giving you a window to counter. The timing is strict, so you can easily mistime the deflection and eat a knuckle sandwich. Guarding is a much safer endeavor, but excessively using it rapidly depletes Structure—and that leads to a guard break.
You can also evade attacks with a dedicated dodge button. This is a back-step by default, but you can influence the movement with directional inputs if you wish to evade in a specific direction. Holding down the evasion button lets you run, which is ideal for creating space or setting up a lunging attack. There are downsides to evading, however. It doesn’t give full invulnerability as is usually the case in action games; you can’t dodge through attacks like you can in, say, Bayonetta or Devil May Cry. You cannot dive into a mob and dodge your way out of harm, since you will inevitably get nailed by an errant swing during the animation recovery.
Butterflies and Bees
The most important defensive tool in your arsenal is also the one that is least obvious, which is the weave. While holding the block button, you can tap the directional key/stick backwards to bob and weave under attacks. Like in God Hand, weaving grants you invulnerability to high strikes, with the added bonus of preserving your position, so you can counterattack much more quickly than with the dodge. Weaving is a gamechanger, as it lets you defend in an aggressive, pseudo-offensive way that gives you the means to stand amidst a mob and dominate foes in a stylish, thoroughly engaging manner. Unfortunately, the hero moves slowly when attacking from a weave, which makes it a tad difficult to counter attacking opponents in an aggressive fashion.
In addition, tapping the directional key forward during a block unleashes a hop that lets you evade low strikes, but opens you to any incoming high strikes. These abilities are integral to Sifu’s action, so it would be nice to see it mentioned in an ability memo somewhere on the aforementioned whiteboard (we found it by accident during one of our demo runs).
As you fight enemies, you earn meter that can be spent on Focus Strikes. Holding the Focus button slows the action, letting you target specific points on your opponent to unleash a powerful attack. These are a useful way to deal easy bonus damage, but in truth this mechanic was the most underutilized in our experience. The moves are practical, but not particularly flashy, and the Focus meter is extremely small and subtle, so it’s easy to forget it’s there. A larger and more distinct meter would help this, as would flashier Focus Strikes.
Everything Is Fair
Sifu’s combat flows well. Once you familiarize yourself with the controls and abilities, your effectiveness all boils down to mastery. Sure, enemy types have their gimmicks. For example, female opponents have absurd reach with their kicks, and they love unleashing sweep attacks. On the other hand, chunky, male bruisers love grappling. As with classic, arcade beat ‘em ups, Sifu demands that you learn these tricky enemy attack patterns. If you dig Streets of Rage 4, you know memorization is just as important as action and reaction.
Environments are littered with extremely powerful tools and weapons to use. You can grab bottles, bats, and pipes to use as weapons, or throw them at targets for damage. You can also kick and throw said objects, as well as chairs and small items, right off the ground without the need to pick them up. The animations are slick and seamless, and you can perform these actions mid-fight, resulting in awesome, Jackie Chan-style combat that is as impressive to watch as it is to play.
With that said, Sifu is bloody hard. You’re going to get your clock repeatedly cleaned, because the enemies don’t play nice. Sure, you regenerate a small amount of health when you finish an enemy, but there are no healing items to abuse outside of this small grace. You’re probably going to die a lot, and Sifu has a curious retry system.
The protagonist owns a coin-laden pendant that revives him upon death. You can resume fights immediately after falling, but doing so ages the hero, physically changing his appearance. The aging is additive; one revival ages you one year, a second ages you two years, a third ages you three years, and so on. This also consumes the pendant’s coins, with the last one leaving you as a frail, 70+ year old man with no more revival options—just a game over screen should the protagonist fall. This system impacts the gameplay, too. As the character ages, they gets notably stronger, but the tradeoff is reduced health. There are clearly strong story elements tied to this system, but we’ll have to wait and see how it plays into the overall experience come launch.
Can Your PC Run Sifu?
At the moment, Sifu lacks recommended specs, but the minimum requirements demand that your gaming PC house at least an Intel i5-7300U processor; AMD Radeon HD 7870, Nvidia GeForce GTX 600, or equivalent DX11 GPU; 8GB of RAM; and the Windows 7 operating system. Slocap hasn’t revealed the storage requirements for this Epic Games Store release. On a desktop PC with an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 processor, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 GPU, and 16GB of RAM, Sifu ran fairly well at maximum graphics settings, but we expected better performance.
Unfortunately, the demo we played was a bit unstable. In the several hours we played, it crashed twice, and suffered from noticeable slowdown during room transitions (and even during some combat sequences). On a few occasions, the frame rate fluctuated from a smooth 60 frames per second to jittery 40 frames per second. We hope that Sloclap tightens the package before the game’s launch.
Get Ready to Fight
Sifu has solid mechanical systems at work under the hood, delivering a style of action that is sorely missed since God Hand is no more. The brutal challenge, satisfying defensive options, and seamless environmental integration produces classic, arcade-style action that isn’t all that common these days. We hope Sloclap cleans up the performance and tightens up the action a smidge prior to its February 8, 2022 release.
