Sifu – Oldboy or Youngboy?

Do you miss the Jackie Chan movies? And with Van Damme? How long has it been since a new Mortal Kombat movie came out? How long has it been?! Oh my God...

Alas, fighting games haven't been at the top for a long time, but Sifu, the new game from Sloclap, invites the player to remember the feelings of when we were cramming combos on worksheets.

For a 2023 fighting game, Sifu looks a little strange. It's not about the graphics, she is a joy to look at. The fact that this fighting game went against the market, offering an alternative.

- Modern games are getting easier, - aptly noted gamer.

- No, I haven't," said Sifu.

Sifu's plot is a cliché, which is not annoying.

The script here is taken from a typical nineties action movie: the protagonist is a young kung-fu fighter, learning the martial arts craft from a sensei. One day a gang of bandits bursts into the house and kills the protagonist's entire family and then himself. But Si Fu, - that is the name of the main character, - manages to resurrect himself with the help of a magic amulet. The amulet brings its owner back to life, but in return shortens his life by a year.

The whole plot of Sifu is a way of revenge for the death of loved ones... And here it would be possible to blame the writers for unoriginal plot twist, but the final message of the authors fully justifies their intention. We can go through the game twice: once, starting as a twenty-year-old boy. We'll be dying, resurrecting with the amulet, and closer to old age (often it doesn't happen), we finally get our revenge on the whole gang. The second time we can go through the game as an elderly character and spare those for whom we felt hatred.

Were the years of life worth the mere revenge? Wouldn't it have been more correct to stop the evil and come to humility?

Do games often bring up such deep themes? That's what I think.

Sifu gameplay is game cathartic: The Line Between Growth and Pain.

The game begins with an unobtrusive tutorial. This is the only place in the game where you can relax. Starting from the first level in the slums, you will be clearly conveyed the main point of Sifu - the game is too damn complicated.

Complexity is not expressed in zaklikivaniem dozens of enemies one key to the loss of pulse, complexity here is another. You will have to learn to play by trial and error. The game mercilessly punishes for everything: for slow reaction, for miscalls, for bad camera view. Yes, Sifu is so harsh that sometimes it forces you to fight almost blind...

In the good old fighting games from the PlayStation 1 era, you had to open the combo panel, write them down and hone them to automatism, in Sifu it's about the same story.

The level designs are small arenas with multiple opponents. Unlike Hollywood action movies, the local badasses will not wait their turn, they will surround and wait for the right moment to strike.

The second level exactly repeats the famous corridor scene from "Oldboy", and here you will feel the difference between the game and the movie.

Every time we run out of health, our hero will lie dead, and another year will be added to his age. With each death our age counter grows in geometric progression: you die - 21, you die again - 23 years, you get blows for the third time - 27 years.

You can reset the progression, but you can't get back the lost years. As soon as C.F. turns 80 and gets beaten up at least once, you go through it all over again. Yes, all over again, as in the games of the nineties, where there was not even a point of saving, sometimes gamers had no saves at all.

Someone complained that modern games have too short plots that you can run the game in 10 hours? Here is Sifu. In this game the story consists of only five levels, at the end of which a boss battle awaits you - one of the killers of the protagonist's family.

Theoretically it is possible to pass Sifu in 10 hours, but if you are not Asian pianist that knows all fatalities of MK by heart, then get ready for pain...

The thing is, the animations in the game are so damn fast. Sometimes you just don't have time to dodge or block blows, especially from multiple enemies at once. Some blows can't be blocked at all. During these attacks the limbs of your opponents shimmer in a red halo. But the best is yet to come...

Are you used to blocking attacks by shielding yourself in some Souls-like game? In Sifu, that doesn't work: you can get hit in the body as well as in the legs. Blocks are also different. Each character, just like in any Souls-like game, has a stamina bar. If you run out of stamina, you're going to have to get beaten up. It's not just about the enemies. But the best is yet to come...

Beginning in the second chapter, the opponents have knives. Blows from knives are impossible to block, so you will have to rely only on your own agility and luck...

If even these arguments didn't convince you, here is an addition: in Sifu you can't notch the locations and pass the game on timings. Sifu constantly encourages the player to learn. In essence, the player goes through Shaolin monk training, only with a keyboard and mouse or gamepad in hand. Speaking of the gamepad...

Why is Sifu better on PlayStation 5?

The game is also available on PC. Fortunately, the optimization on PC has not failed. But playing on PC, you will miss the main feature of the game - full support for DualSense.

The gamepad reacts to every hit with a speaker, and to every finish with vibration. Given the frantic pace of Sifu, the DualSense feels like it's convulsing all the time. Of course, the gamepad drains in about four hours. But who's to say you'll last that long?