Sifu - PS4/PS5/PC

Looks pretty great, enough that I'm wishing it had released on Friday instead of the disappointment known as Dying Light 2. Sucks that the PC version was sold out to Timmy Tencent though.

Kind of torn on this. I was ready to immediately go buy the preorder/early access on PS5 yesterday for about 95% of Karak's review, then at the very end he went and compared the combat to Sekiro. That resulted in instant pumping of brakes, and I waited for the Fitgirl "demo" to try it for myself on PC. Unfortunately, I think his comparison is pretty accurate. I just barely squeaked through the first stage finishing it at the ripe old age of 70 (pretty sure the next death would have been a game over). Biggest issue for me is deciding what's good to buy with XP and the rewards from the jade statues.

Still want to buy it just as a fuck you to those assholes white knighting about cultural appropriation for a country which has spent the last several decades stealing every bit of technology and IP that they can get their hands on, but I'm not sure I'll ever really enjoy the gameplay.

I wonder if some of 'it's too hard' crying would have gone away if the game had made it clear in that first fight with the big dude that L1+up/down on the stick isn't just for avoiding grabs. It's far more useful for dodging attacks--especially against bosses--than the R2 avoid. You still need decent timing, but even if you mess up you're holding down block and won't get hurt unless your timing is completely off.

It's also not hard to unlock stuff permanently if you redo a level a bunch of times to 'get it right'. The game should probably have made it more clear that the XP you spend on permanent unlocks never resets; only the initial purchase does. So if you finish level 1 with 2500 xp you can buy the leg sweep focus move for 500, then buy 4x 500 permanent unlocks. Run level 1 again and the move will be reset, but once you get 500 xp you can unlock it again, then with another 500 you can unlock it permanently. If you're really persistent you could unlock all 500-750 xp moves on the first level without too much trouble. The 1000's could be done too I suppose, but it would be rather tedious since there's not exactly a ton of xp available in level 1 and you always waste the base cost worth of XP each time you re-run a level.

Also, I don't recall the game ever telling you this at all, but you can press right on the d-pad at any time to increase your score multiplier by 2. Score unlocks at the jade statue are pretty strong so there's no reason to ever kill any dudes without having 5x going.

P.S. If you're playing on PC and have an ultrawide, you need this: GitHub - RoseTheFlower/UltrawideIndex: A growing collection of widescreen and wider solutions from Rose of WSGF. Pretty sad that they clearly made an effort to get ultrawide support in the game and then fucked it all up by letting UE4 use its default vert- bullshit.

Note that all of Rose's UW patches use Cheat Engine to change the FOV, so you'll likely have to jump through some hoops to get Windows Defender to let you download and run it. MS has an massive hard on for false flagging anything remotely related to CE as a virus.