Disclaimer: I didn’t finish the game, why? – find out from the text.

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THE GAME IS EXTREMELY HARD . And now about everything in order.

The term “sifu” or “shifu” has several meanings. In the first interpretation, this term means “masters of their craft”, that is, sifu (師傅) you can call both a pizza master and a martial arts master. The second meaning is written a little differently (師父, where 師” is teacher, 父 is father) and means “me and father” in the context that a teacher is like a father to a student or even closer.

Such a sifu was the father of the protagonist. He is betrayed by his own students, and a magical talisman saves the little protagonist from death. After several years of training, a 20-year-old boy or girl who survived decides to take revenge on the traitors and murderers. The plot is needed for the starting point and you are unlikely to remember it in the near future. But in case you’re wondering, there is an investigation board in the hero’s house with clues that we collect in the levels. Between missions, you can explore the already completed location by collecting items and learn more about the people we are against.

For all the good

The game is very stylish, first of all it concerns the picture, which is stylized as a low-poly, but artistically done well. The animations are also very smooth, as you can get in a game like this. Watching the choreography of the fight is almost more enjoyable than playing the game itself. Some scenes cite iconic scenes from Oldboy, John Wick and other films famous for hand-to-hand combat. During the battle, bottles, pieces of furniture and clubs scatter in the frame, with which you “stroke” the faces of opponents. And all this with cheerful music that complements the overall atmosphere of the game.

This scene is missing a hammer

There was no Chinese voice acting in the press version, they promise to add it soon after the release, with it the game will only add atmosphere. Another good thing is that the game has one of the best photo modes that I have seen, and the developers have done a good job with DualSense, the feedback helps a lot to immerse yourself in the atmosphere.

The first and fundamental problem of the game is that there is simply not enough content in it. If you imagine it as a linear game, then it should be completed in about 3 hours. On the first two locations, excluding cuts, I spent about 30-40 minutes each (I spotted), in total there are 5 missions in the game. I assume that it is for this reason that the developers screwed rogue-light elements into the game and twisted the difficulty somewhere to the level of the exosphere, corny to stretch the gameplay.

My kung fu is stronger than your kung fu

For the successful accomplishment of revenge, we have two blows at our disposal: strong and weak; dodge (dodge) and block / parry followed by a counterattack. If everything is clear with the first two, then I will dwell on the parry in more detail.

With a simple click on L1, the hero holds a block that blocks most attacks. During the hold, we can additionally dodge up or down while remaining in place (not to be confused with the classic dodge). If you press the block moments before the opponent’s strike, the player makes a parry and you can strike back.

In games with similar mechanics, the enemy always makes it clear that he will attack now, these fractions of seconds are usually enough to react. In Sifu, you rely solely on spider sense and luck. It’s not a problem to memorize the behavior patterns of opponents, but you will never know when they will start to perform this or that attack. And now you parry the top blow, and the enemy makes the bottom one and you are already lying on the cold ground and shouting all sorts of obscene words at the screen. And of course, there is a boss in the game that is almost impossible to kill without using a parry.

In addition to the broken, it seems to me, parry, the combo system works incomprehensibly in the game. The description says just like in fighting games – forward twice (on the enemy) and hit. But this system works once out of ten, so sometimes it’s easier to “call out” ordinary opponents with regular strikes.

The game uses a system similar to Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice – a scale of health and structure. When hit, both are taken away from you, but if the structure bar fills up, you will be very hurt, and if you are not lucky, the character will become short of breath and remain completely defenseless for a few seconds, which will lead to guaranteed death.

If you knock down the structure of the opponents, then you can carry out a beautiful finishing move with the contextual use of the environment. Ordinary opponents can be killed before their structure dries up, but bosses are defeated only after they are completely destabilized. And yes, the leaders are very complex, all without exception.

The global combat system is complex, with a whole bunch of tricks, special attacks using concentration and combinations of all this. The game gives enough ways to control the battle and it all depends on your attentiveness and study of the mechanics.

Opponents like to corner, take in a vise or surround them corny, and you need to be able to run away from all this, sometimes literally. Add to that melee weapons and the ability to throw bottles or poorly screwed furniture at opponents and you get just a hurricane of action. But damn hard action.

Death in spite of

The main mechanic and feature of the game is death. This is a really interesting find, but like everything in this game, it will make you suffer. We start the game at the age of 20, with each death, the age is added by the number of deaths. That is, they died the first time, we get plus one year (20 + 1 = 21), they died the second time, add a couple more to the already existing ones (21 + 2 = 23), etc. Every ten (30, 40, 50, etc.) increases the damage dealt, but reduces the life bar. The number of deaths can be reduced in battles but only by one unit, and in sanctuaries it can be reset completely for 1000 experience. But the age itself cannot be reset, it is with you until the end of the game .

The player starts the next mission at the age at which he finished the previous one, and each replay of the mission will be from this age. The first boss was killed at the age of 30, the second mission starts at the same age and, for example, we kill the second boss by the age of 50. We begin the third mission at the age of 50. If you want to replay the second mission again, then you will start it like the first time, from the age of 30, and if you pass it, the progress will be overwritten. If you managed to replay it better, great, if worse, well … then you’ll be lucky in something else. At the same time, the bonuses of the Serpent Sanctuary are also overwritten, but about him a little later. On a positive note, all plot items found are saved forever.

After dying at the age of 70 or older, you return to the hub and can try again with the bonuses that you had at the beginning of each mission. As a result, the whole game must be completed in one life cycle, in the context of Sifu it sounds literally like never before.

The game uses rogue-light game systems, all experience gained is lost, and all purchased moves are cancelled. Although the latter can be redeemed permanently, but for this you need to pay an additional x5 cost of admission.

That is, if the combo costs 1000 points, then for a full redemption you need to: pay 1000 to unlock, and five more times 1000 to buy back forever. But not everything is so simple. If you have already paid, say, 2 times 1000 and died, you were returned to the beginning of the level, all the experience has disappeared, and now, in order to continue unlocking the reception, you need to open it again and only then continue the redemption. It turns out that instead of the required 6000 experience, you will pay much more.

With good dexterity, luck and if you don’t miss a beat, then for one successful run in the level you can earn about 2000-3000 experience. It’s good that you can spend them during the mission, so you don’t have to worry that you will lose everything before the end of the race. Now consider that there are 20 purchasable moves in the game that cost from 500 to 1500 experience points and do not forget to additionally multiply by at least six. To learn a technique, especially an expensive one, you will have to make several races and it is desirable that all of them be successful.

I explain all this in such detail to understand that the game turns into a monotonous grind that gets boring after a few hours of playing, although the basic gameplay itself is good, albeit with its drawbacks. I am sure that the game can be completed without opening additional skills, only on timings and reactions, and there will definitely be such people, we are waiting for the video on youtube.

During the mission, we come across Serpent Sanctuaries, two or three per location, where you can get one of the available bonuses. To purchase some, you need to meet a certain age, for others – to have a certain number of experience points.

The bottom line is that in order to get the desired bonus, you must first unlock the bonus cell and activate the desired effect on the second sanctuary. Some upgrades are saved per shrine. And for the reward to be fixed, you must successfully complete the mission. It seems simple, but even here there was a place for a flaw, or rather understatement.

Grinding all the bonuses on the first mission, as with the same combos, will not work, because they are reset. That is, you come to the second mission with the bonuses that you learned in the first one, to the third one with those that you learned in the previous two, and so on. But, if you want to replay one of the missions, then those bonuses that you had open at the time of the first passage of this mission will be available.

The problem is that the game does not explain all of the above, you yourself have to guess along the way how exactly this system works. Many will write in the comments that in Souls-games, in the same way, you need to explore the world yourself and write this down as an advantage of the game. That’s right, but the fundamental difference between Sifu and FromSoftware games is that Miyazaki explains the basic rules of the game, he says how to play his game, and he doesn’t say what to do in it. In Sifu, they don’t explain the rules and mechanics that matter to you.

Perhaps, the developers decided to hype the overcomplexity, because Demon’s Souls succeeded and now everyone compares complex games with Miyazaki’s creations (now there is every chance that they will be compared with Sifu). I would like to believe that after some time the developers will introduce the “Stories” mode for those who just want to run through the plot and, like the hero of films with Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee, beautifully scatter everyone in a kung fu combat dance.

The game was not positioned in any way as a hardcore karate simulator, for the passage of which you need to invest several tens of hours. As a result, as a game in a vacuum, Sifu is very good, it has a unique death mechanic, a combat system worked out, although not to the ideal, a recognizable visual style, and all this is buried under a thick blockage of grind and sky-high complexity.

If someone still decides to buy the game, be sure to share your impressions in the comments.