fights in tight spaces does a very good (or at least interesting?) job of translating the mechanics of cinematic fighting into the Digital Realm, but fails at capturing the emotional satisfaction which makes such fighting so captivating. it's no surprise that video games like this & sifu would try to recreate john wick style shit, just look at how many other movies are ripping it off right now. the problem is, how do you translate thousands of hours of training and careful choreography designed to look effortlessly skilled into something that a player without any training or choreography can immediately pick up on? the approach here is to break it down into turns, each punch and kick and grapple is an individual card you can deploy and you're unbound by the temporal realm, so you've essentially replaced instinct with unlimited time to think. this is a very solid approach and it works well in a lot of places, especially in the early game where the difficulty is reasonable and you have some freedom to experiment with your approach. this is far from the first game to try something like this (i mean, even xcom basically does this stuff), but it's the first i've played to use it as a means of expressing cinematic combat, and for that i do think it's a worthwhile experiment.

the game fails in two big ways however - for one, and as many others have pointed out, the difficulty curve is just insane. by the second or third stage you're being bombarded with overwhelming numbers of enemies in incredibly crowded spaces which all have varied attacks that you simply can't deal with. i'm sure some of this is due to my own lack of skill, but i'm seeing similar complaints from steam reviewers with hundreds of hours so idk lol.
this is such a big problem for me because of the second big way this game fails - this difficulty curve brings out the inherent problems in using roguelike mechanics to represent this type of fighting. you ultimately are beholden to the luck of the draw, and if you get into a particularly dicey situation, you can very easily find yourself in a situation where you know exactly what moves are necessary to win the fight but simply do not have access to them. that's pretty normal for roguelikes, but it feels very bad when i'm supposed to be a rama style badass!! there's a tangible difference between dying and having to restart at a checkpoint in an action game because you took a bad punch vs. losing a roguelike because you made a bad decision an hour and a half ago, and it is a difference which does not lend itself well to a genre full of instinct and prowess and that Effortlessness i mentioned earlier. so yeah give this one a try maybe but play something else if you're looking for the Sick Movie Kung Fu In Gaming which i described above