This game is all about revenge. Not just the revenge of the mc after their father is killed, but SloClap's after the failure that was Absolver. Which is the real base of Sifu, using many similar moves and a similar art style. Despite this however the end result couldn't have been more different, considering the huge success of Sifu and how it makes up for the weaknesses that Absolver had. The real issues with Absolver lie not with it's gameplay but it's lack of an identity and the mass appeal it had as a pvp deck based fighting game. Which Sifu elegantly remedies in a pretty simple manner. Rather than being a vehicle for the gameplay with no personality to speak of, it has an identity of ruthlessness with an Asian martial arts setting. Nothing complicated, but it gets the job done. Something I could similarly say about the story; which like I specified before, is all about revenge. It doesn't really do anything that interesting. Just the same old story about the cycle of vengence and how the mc is no better than those who wronged him. You know the drill that's how these things go, the best parts of the story are the ones that the game has you figure out by yourself when looking around each level, which I appreciated. But these were sidelined for a reason, the game knows what everyone is really here for, the gameplay. It's a very satisfying defense oriented system that is extremely easy to get into with a lot to improve on. Exactly what you want from your combat system. The thing I found the most interesting about it however is the fact that rather then having it's depth and focus on offense as do most 3D beat em ups, such as DMC, Arkham, or Bayonetta, the most prideful I felt in Sifu was through a mastery of parries and dodges.
Your offensive options in this game just aren't as integral to your gameplan due to how it sets up both the bosses and the elite enemies. As you only get a certain amount of hits every time you dodge or open them up, meaning that against the hardest enemies offense is sort of a binary. Did you do as much damage as you could in the brief amount of time? If yes then you repeat that sequence as there is not one other reason to do anything else. And it's not as if doing optimal damage is very hard or interesting either, as the different combos in this game are just pressing one button until you have to press another, almost Dynasty Warrior style. When I say this it seems as if I'm really ragging on it, and while I do believe that there is a lot of unused potential in this aspect I want to make it clear that it still feels great execution and presentation wise. Everything is incredibly responsive and the finisher animations are amazing, they never get tiring. They have so many different variations, sometimes using the environment and sometimes your weapon, and it goes by extremely fast too, unlike something like Spiderman PS4. So even if it isn't the deepest or most complex system in the world it's responsive, has many frames where you can cancel to parry, and most importantly makes you feel cool, so it's still fun overall. Now time for me to stop stalling and talk about the defensive mechanics, parrying and dodging. The real genius behind these is how equally important they are and how they work together. Your perception of how to use both of these systems also changes frequently throughout the playthrough, at first you just parry cause you only fight normal enemies which get stopped by parries easily. Since the first boss also is easier to parry you lean harder into that, but then second level things change up a bit. Both the elites (which are everywhere in this level) and the boss are not so easily beaten by parries.
You also learn that by parrying and blocking certain attacks it does a lot of damage to your "structure" or basically your guard. And then you learn the utility of dodging, how the window to dodge is actually much easier than parrying, and that most attacks in the game are easily dodged in one direction. Then the further you get into the game you start running into more enemies capable of high low mixups, which can be extremely hard to react to. Which is when your final realization happens. Parrying doesn't matter regardless of high low, and also adds damage to the opponents structure, meaning even if you can't completely deflect an attack, it will still have a lasting impact. At this point it becomes a really captivating balance between parrying offensively to chip away at your opponents, and dodging in order to regain your structure. All this while you have to learn and adapt to new movesets from bosses or enemies. This also compliments the death system extremely well, as a ton of the replay value in this game is to finish the game with lower and lower ages. It intrinsically motivates the player to keep playing so that they can improve and achieve the end goal of being virtually perfect. Unfortunately however that's kind of all the good I have to say for the aging system in this game. Getting older whenever you die and it growing exponentially based upon how many times you die in a fight is a great idea, and one of the most interesting fail states I've ever seen; but besides visually I barely felt any difference. It's supposed to make your health lower and your damage higher but from 20 to 75 the health has 1/4th depleted and frankly I couldn't really notice the difference in damage. I would have liked more changes besides these values such as damage, like maybe the dodge window is lower, or your structure gets reduced.
These would lead to the gameplay experience being massively different from 20 to 75; who knows, though it's possible I didn't notice due to going from 20 to 30 to 40 to 50 and being introduced to the change gradually rather than immediately. The only other change that being old brings is limiting the abilities that you can upgrade, which brings me to an issue that I'm honestly iffy about. I believe that most of the upgrades aren't substantial enough and don't feel that good to get, and the fact that you have to waste a million exp in order to unlock one permanently. They sort of have to make upgrades feel bad because it is extremely easy to lose all your upgrades. If you game over once you lose literally everything, so they didn't want to punish you that badly for game over-ing, or at least didn't want it to feel too different. But of course this just serves to make the game feel worse, and you don't feel as rewarded as you should for surviving as long as possible and keeping all your upgrades. It works both ways, and personally I'd like it more if you could get more then just techniques or moves, like your focus bar or other random perks. Because the way it is now it doesn't feel like the upgrades matter past a small few, and the upgrades you can get at the statues are extremely limited and broken. Since it's so limited though you don't have nearly enough time to get everything you want, though that part is likely intentional and a non-issue. The last thing I want to talk about is some of the surprisingly surreal visuals in the game. It starts of quite normal but when your character starts seeing things it's always a visual treat. Absolutely peaking with level 3 which has both beautiful and trippy visuals at the same time. I was thinking about how this reflected the main character's mental state a ton but honestly I've deemed that most of the time it means absolutely nothing and they put it in there to look cool, which it achieves successfully.
To wrap up this review which frankly is getting a little out of hand I'll say that this was a really fun single player experience that I would recommend if you think that you would replay it. If you are going to pick up the game once and then never play again after you will barely get $20 of value out of this $40 game. I've reached the point where it feels like I've seen it all, there isn't enough variation between runs to keep things fresh like other games of the rougelite genre, and if it wasn't for the fact that I wanted to improve then I would probably have just moved on to a different game. If you don't find yourself intrinsically motivated by things similar to this then I would recommend waiting for a big price drop. It may not be well rounded, but it has a fantastic combat system that I could return to 10 years from now and still have a blast.
7/10
also I forgot to say but the camera sucks sometimes
Your offensive options in this game just aren't as integral to your gameplan due to how it sets up both the bosses and the elite enemies. As you only get a certain amount of hits every time you dodge or open them up, meaning that against the hardest enemies offense is sort of a binary. Did you do as much damage as you could in the brief amount of time? If yes then you repeat that sequence as there is not one other reason to do anything else. And it's not as if doing optimal damage is very hard or interesting either, as the different combos in this game are just pressing one button until you have to press another, almost Dynasty Warrior style. When I say this it seems as if I'm really ragging on it, and while I do believe that there is a lot of unused potential in this aspect I want to make it clear that it still feels great execution and presentation wise. Everything is incredibly responsive and the finisher animations are amazing, they never get tiring. They have so many different variations, sometimes using the environment and sometimes your weapon, and it goes by extremely fast too, unlike something like Spiderman PS4. So even if it isn't the deepest or most complex system in the world it's responsive, has many frames where you can cancel to parry, and most importantly makes you feel cool, so it's still fun overall. Now time for me to stop stalling and talk about the defensive mechanics, parrying and dodging. The real genius behind these is how equally important they are and how they work together. Your perception of how to use both of these systems also changes frequently throughout the playthrough, at first you just parry cause you only fight normal enemies which get stopped by parries easily. Since the first boss also is easier to parry you lean harder into that, but then second level things change up a bit. Both the elites (which are everywhere in this level) and the boss are not so easily beaten by parries.
You also learn that by parrying and blocking certain attacks it does a lot of damage to your "structure" or basically your guard. And then you learn the utility of dodging, how the window to dodge is actually much easier than parrying, and that most attacks in the game are easily dodged in one direction. Then the further you get into the game you start running into more enemies capable of high low mixups, which can be extremely hard to react to. Which is when your final realization happens. Parrying doesn't matter regardless of high low, and also adds damage to the opponents structure, meaning even if you can't completely deflect an attack, it will still have a lasting impact. At this point it becomes a really captivating balance between parrying offensively to chip away at your opponents, and dodging in order to regain your structure. All this while you have to learn and adapt to new movesets from bosses or enemies. This also compliments the death system extremely well, as a ton of the replay value in this game is to finish the game with lower and lower ages. It intrinsically motivates the player to keep playing so that they can improve and achieve the end goal of being virtually perfect. Unfortunately however that's kind of all the good I have to say for the aging system in this game. Getting older whenever you die and it growing exponentially based upon how many times you die in a fight is a great idea, and one of the most interesting fail states I've ever seen; but besides visually I barely felt any difference. It's supposed to make your health lower and your damage higher but from 20 to 75 the health has 1/4th depleted and frankly I couldn't really notice the difference in damage. I would have liked more changes besides these values such as damage, like maybe the dodge window is lower, or your structure gets reduced.
These would lead to the gameplay experience being massively different from 20 to 75; who knows, though it's possible I didn't notice due to going from 20 to 30 to 40 to 50 and being introduced to the change gradually rather than immediately. The only other change that being old brings is limiting the abilities that you can upgrade, which brings me to an issue that I'm honestly iffy about. I believe that most of the upgrades aren't substantial enough and don't feel that good to get, and the fact that you have to waste a million exp in order to unlock one permanently. They sort of have to make upgrades feel bad because it is extremely easy to lose all your upgrades. If you game over once you lose literally everything, so they didn't want to punish you that badly for game over-ing, or at least didn't want it to feel too different. But of course this just serves to make the game feel worse, and you don't feel as rewarded as you should for surviving as long as possible and keeping all your upgrades. It works both ways, and personally I'd like it more if you could get more then just techniques or moves, like your focus bar or other random perks. Because the way it is now it doesn't feel like the upgrades matter past a small few, and the upgrades you can get at the statues are extremely limited and broken. Since it's so limited though you don't have nearly enough time to get everything you want, though that part is likely intentional and a non-issue. The last thing I want to talk about is some of the surprisingly surreal visuals in the game. It starts of quite normal but when your character starts seeing things it's always a visual treat. Absolutely peaking with level 3 which has both beautiful and trippy visuals at the same time. I was thinking about how this reflected the main character's mental state a ton but honestly I've deemed that most of the time it means absolutely nothing and they put it in there to look cool, which it achieves successfully.
To wrap up this review which frankly is getting a little out of hand I'll say that this was a really fun single player experience that I would recommend if you think that you would replay it. If you are going to pick up the game once and then never play again after you will barely get $20 of value out of this $40 game. I've reached the point where it feels like I've seen it all, there isn't enough variation between runs to keep things fresh like other games of the rougelite genre, and if it wasn't for the fact that I wanted to improve then I would probably have just moved on to a different game. If you don't find yourself intrinsically motivated by things similar to this then I would recommend waiting for a big price drop. It may not be well rounded, but it has a fantastic combat system that I could return to 10 years from now and still have a blast.
7/10
also I forgot to say but the camera sucks sometimes