Sifu review: martial arts roguelike is too complex for its own good

Sifu’s got a good pitch. You are a martial arts master, bent on revenge, fighting odds that are impossible to overcome in a lifetime. But you have a secret weapon: Each time you die, you rise again. You race to finish your quest as your avatar grows frail and gray.

It’s a novel concept, so it’s a shame that developer Sloclap wasn’t able to make it work. Sifu is a game full of confusing, inescapable, infuriating shortcomings, and almost all of them are tied to its supernatural twist.

Image: Sloclap via Polygon

Before we get into that, let’s talk about the good stuff: The “badass martial arts master” portion of the pitch is executed with incredible skill. Sifu has the bones of a wonderful action game, giving you all the tools to play out your Hong Kong action fantasies. Light and heavy attacks string into beautifully animated combos that hit with satisfying thwacks and comic book motion lines. You can finish stunned enemies with brutal, speedy environmental executions that will elicit gasps over and over again. From the jump, you’re a force to be reckoned with.

But your enemies put up a fight. They can drop you in a couple of hits, and they use their numbers to surround and overpower you. Sifu’s goons are hardly as polite as the kind we’ve come to expect in a post-Batman: Arkham third-person combat world. They don’t wait their turn, and they don’t broadcast their intent with blinking warning icons. So you’re always on the move, sliding across tables and hopping over furniture — constantly scrambling to deny them the full benefit of their superior numbers.

Image: Sloclap via Polygon

When assailants do catch up to you, you’ve still got tools — maybe too many. Sifu’s defensive resource is called “structure,” and it works a lot like “posture” in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. You can block to absorb attacks, but your structure meter swells. When it fills, it shatters, leaving you vulnerable for a few precious seconds. But if you perfectly time your block, the enemy will take structure damage instead. Sifu adds another layer of technical complexity with its “avoids,” which are executed by holding the block button and flicking the left stick up or down, depending on whether you’re evading a high attack or low attack. With the right timing, you’ll escape damage and recover a bit of structure.

Learning the utility of each of these defensive tools takes a lot of effort, but it comes with its rewards. There’s nothing like perfectly timing a duck under an incoming baseball bat and watching your opponent slug the poor goon behind you.

Sifu is at its very best when it drops you into overwhelming scenarios and asks you to use these offensive and defensive tools to overcome the odds. You’ll shove a foe into a crowd of his allies and then flow…