SIFU

FIRST LOOK

There’s a hallway fight in the Sifu trailer that two PC Gamer staffers separately reacted to by saying, “Ah, Oldboy.” It’s a kung-fu brawler with obvious inspirations: The Raid, John Wick, the prop combat of Jackie Chan, the power of Bruce Lee. Sifu is meant to be a martial arts movie you can play.

You’ve got to be a little skeptical of a game that sets out to emulate movie legends like that, but what’s exciting about Sifu is that the developers behind it might actually have the chops (and punches, kicks, etc) to pull it off. Its creator is Paris-based studio Sloclap, whose first game was the fantastic online fighter Absolver, one of the best martial arts games out there.

I could go on and on about and how it deserved much more love than it got, but. The focus of is PvP, but there are NPCs to fight, and there’s light storytelling to guide new players. Its fighting is complex, with both manual stance changing and moves that start and finish in different stances, precision timing (especially to smoothly chain together combos), stamina management, weapons, and on top of it all, a moveset editor so you can mix and match attacks of different styles. Just writing about it now makes me want to redownload it—it’s $30 on Steam, and any claim at being a -like aficionado is questionable if you haven’t played it.