Sifu game review: Revenge is too much effort

I wish this was all there was to it. Sifu could have been a straightforward action game, with its difficult, but satisfying fighting combos
A still from the action game Sifu
A still from the action game Sifu

An evil martial-arts expert fights students at his old school, and then brutally K.O-s the school’s “Sifu”. Sifu’s child, a witness to this event, miraculously escapes death. But she swears revenge. This action game requires relentless keyboard-smashing to execute kung-fu combos in pursuit of evil villains. There are five bosses in this game. Each boss is a milestone, and subsequent bosses get more dangerous. The journey of revenge requires effort and experience.

I wish this was all there was to it. Sifu could have been a straightforward action game, with its difficult, but satisfying fighting combos. But this game makes death unnecessarily punishing, while also making it a necessity to progress in the game. I am going to try my best to explain the mathematics of it. Every time the protagonist dies in the game, she ages. Ageing does make me powerful, but it also means I can take lesser punches. The ageing process is a Fibonacci sequence. I start at the age of 20. I die once, and then respawn at the same spot as a 21-year-old. I die again, and I am now 23. Then 26. The punishing arithmetic progression of ageing can only be stopped by executing powerful knockouts orageing to the age of 70. But if I hit 70, it means I would now restart the whole level from the beginning.

Sifu is not a game for beginners. It’s not a game for experts either, especially if you’re as impatient as I am. It’s impossible for us to cross a level in a single attempt. Skill-upgrades are temporary unless you pay for them five times. This means that by design, the game anticipates you dying atleast five times at any given level. The environment does not change, and neither do the enemies. It gets repetitive to the point of becoming almost robotic; because there’s not much that can be done in terms of attack strategy.

There’s no stealth. There’s no environment advantage. The only thing that you can do, is die multiple times, buy skills, become better at anticipating attacks, and hope that you have the reflexes required to smash keys in the right order. 

I wondered at several points in the game if the whole death and ageing factor was a metaphor. Maybe the game is trying to tell us that “revenge requires perseverance”, or “revenge is a dish best served old”. I may never know; I couldn’t finish the game. Having said that, I think Sifu is a refreshing take on action games. I enjoyed the animation, music, and the limited dialogues. If beat ’em up games are your thing, Sifu is worth a try if you own a good PC or a PlayStation.

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