Sifu

Sifu is one of the best games I’ve ever played. It’s just genius, the way everything is put together it feels like a game made with so much love and passion. The game feels like it was made by people who love martial arts and video games, the mechanics feel so good, the moves are straight up amazing. The Bak Mei inspired style that Sifu uses is insanely cool. The flow of the combat is super addictive and all of that on top of an AWESOME art style. Might be the most badass game I’ve ever played.

In fact, all of the kungfoo used in the game was mocapped by an actual kungfoo master.

Why is Sifu so great?

Because you get to beat up 10 dudes at once with your badass kungfoo :D

Sifu’s combat is awesome and the amount of skill expression there exists in this game is beyond my imagination. Though that doesn’t come without a hiiiigh skill floor and skyscraper skill ceiling.

The game does become a bit easier as you realize it doesn’t matter what you do so long as you don’t get hit and the enemies die. The score system in the game I kind of dislike for that reason but it is okay.

It took me a while to realize that dodging most enemy attacks is a lot easier in the beginning as the timing is way more forgiving and you get to spam it and usually it works. That being said parrying is literally almost always the better option so it really adds a lot of skill expression.

You can actually trivialize most of the bosses in the game if you just learn to parry which I find cool because I like parrying and I think it is a good thing because it’s still really hard to learn.

At first, watching videos of really good players no-hitting the game and stuff I thought that there were all these crazy combos. Yes there’s combos you can do on bosses that stunlock them or whatever—but the game really focuses more on strings rather than combos. Some of these strings can be extended and looped indefinitely to absolutely destroy a single enemy or group of enemies.

The main expression of skill doesn’t come from combo execution or anything because, as I said the game doesn’t really have combos.

Instead it comes from your knowledge of the encounters and enemy move sets. When they’re going to attack, what attack they’re going to do—etc. etc.

All of that comes with just playing the game more and more there’s stuff you can drill but at the end of the day you just need the intuition. After playing for a long time you just get an intuition for what an enemy might do in a specific situation.

In conclusion

The game has an arcade-y… old beat-em-up feel but with all of the wonders of modern day games. The game has so much replay-ability especially with the game getting free updates and the arenas mode that was added in one of those FREE updates. That added so much content to a game already filled with stuff to do!