Sifu

Genre: Action

Players: 1

The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference

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Review:

Sifu is an Action game released in 2024 on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch and ported to PC and Xbox One in 2025. This game puts you in the role of the son or daughter of a murdered martial arts master who spends the next eight years plotting their revenge, which takes the form of using fists, feet, and other weapons to pummel your way through the killers’ gang and take out their leaders.

In many ways, Sifu seems to be to be a game of high highs and low lows, where the things I like about it, I really like… but the things I hate, I really despise.

At the core of this game is combat that flows smoothly and feels wonderfully visceral, in a way feeling a bit like combat in the Batman: Arkham Asylum series, but far, far more mechanically involved, with players attacking, blocking, deflecting, dodging, and using a variety of other moves in combat.

However, while combat feels amazing at its best, it can also feel clunky at its worst – your character gets a bit too “locked on” to one opponent when fighting in a group of people that all try to get hits on you at the same time It’s not clear what you’re meant to do when an enemy starts “turtling” and blocking a lot, other than back off and wait them out. The timing for deflecting attacks is unclear and I could never be sure if I was doing it right since enemies would gradually wear me down with their attacks anyway. In one room full of enemies, I found that if I engaged it like an actual fight I’d get swarmed and defeated, but if I threw a few punches, ran around in a circle, threw a few more punches, and so on, I could defeat opponents through attrition… which worked, but did not feel at all satisfying in a game whose best moments play out like a great martial arts film.

It also doesn’t help that this game throws a lot of mechanics at you to remember, often requiring multiple simultaneous button presses or button and direction combinations. This also makes things awkward when pressing up or down on the left stick is used as a part of a move… but is also used to move your character.

The game’s levels are fairly linear, having you go through rooms and hallways full of enemies until you finally reach a target enemy who acts as a boss with unique mechanics. It can get a bit repetitive at times, but the varied environments and weapons that you and enemies can get your hands on help to keep things interesting, much like an Arcade Brawler. Though it’s really a shame, because there are areas I encountered that seemed like they offered potential for stealth, for collecting clues to do a little puzzle-solving, or even a bit of social maneuvering… but these brief whiffs of added variety were always quickly snuffed out in favor of fight, fight, fight.

The game does offer an upgrade system to improve your abilities, though I never encountered anything that drastically changed the gameplay. There’s also an “age” mechanic that’s poorly-explained in-game, where each “death” in the game raises your age number, which apparently makes your damage go up but your total health go down. This kinda’ left me scratching my head – it seems gimmicky for the sake of being gimmicky.

When it comes to the presentation, we once again have a disparate mix of good and bad. On the one hand, this game features large, detailed 3D environments… but also simple, ugly characters. On Nintendo Switch, these are made worse by an overall low resolution giving the ol’ Vaseline effect. At the very least, the voice acting here all seems good, and the music clearly seems inspired by martial arts films and fits the game perfectly.

However, while Sifu has its ups and downs, I have to address what I saw as by far the game’s biggest problem on Nintendo Switch – loading times. Just starting up the game and getting to the title screen took me 4 minutes and 57 seconds, during which time there were multiple pauses that made me worry the game had frozen and I’d need to restart. Every time you go to an entirely new location in the game you’re looking at another huge pause, with it taking 2 minutes and 35 seconds to load a level. If you’ve saved a game in your home base, where you’ll need to head to a second location after starting, you’re looking at nearly 8 minutes between the time you fire up the game and the time you’re actually able to start fighting enemies. That is by far the most insane loading time I have encountered on the Nintendo Switch, and it very nearly kills the game for me.

At least… unless you’re playing the game on Nintendo Switch 2, but you’ll have to check out The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference to see how that changes things here.

However, on the original Nintendo Switch, Sifu is a mixed bag, and that mix taints the very good parts with a lot of bad that makes it difficult to recommend this game. There’s some extremely satisfying action here, but it’s beaten down with frustratingly confusing mechanics, odd design choices, and probably the worst loading times I have ever seen, at least in a Nintendo Switch game. I could still see some players enjoying this game, but I highly recommend you enjoy it on another platform… or, you know… check out how the Nintendo Switch 2 runs the game…

tl;dr – Sifu is an Action game where players use martial arts skills to pummel their way through hordes of enemies. The combat here is at turns extremely satisfying and highly frustrating, with some questionable design choices. However, on Nintendo Switch the real problem is the absurdly long loading times, some of the worst I have ever encountered. While you might get some enjoyment out of this, I highly recommend that you do so on another platform.

Grade: C

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The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference

Sifu

Genre: Action

Players: 1

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Review:

The moment I got a feel for how Sifu runs on Nintendo Switch, I knew I would have to test it on Nintendo Switch 2, because as I noted above, my biggest problem with the game on Nintendo Switch is its loading times, which are absolutely atrocious. There are also issues with resolution, so maybe this game could be a whole different experience on Nintendo Switch 2? Well, it’s worth a try, right?

Well, I’ll start with the performance, because as far as I can tell there’s no change there – Sifu on Nintendo Switch 2 still has the same low resolution, the same ugly characters, and the same decent but unspectacular framerate as you had when playing the game on Nintendo Switch. No change there.

Okay, but what about those loading times? As I said in my review of the Nintendo Switch game, it took 4 minutes and 57 seconds to load the game to the main menu, and another 2 minutes and 35 seconds to load a level. These loading times are so horrible that I hoped for any kind of relief here.

And… wow. What a huge difference. 27 seconds to load to the title screen, and another 18 seconds to load a level. Where I complained in my Nintendo Switch review that this game took nearly 8 minutes to get you to the action from startup, on Nintendo Switch 2, that time has been cut down to 45 seconds.

In other words, this game may have had probably the worst loading times of any Nintendo Switch game I’ve ever played, but it also saw by far the biggest improvement to loading times of any Nintendo Switch game I’ve tested on Nintendo Switch 2, beating out the previous record-holder (Monster Hunter Rise) by a huge margin.

Of course, that doesn’t address all the other problems I have with Sifu, but it takes a game that I felt was absolutely crippled by loading times on Nintendo Switch, and turns it into one that I think is truly enjoyable (if flawed) on Nintendo Switch 2. Honestly, it’s such a huge difference that I would recommend not to get this game on a Nintendo platform unless you have a Nintendo Switch 2 to play it on. If so? Well, you might find it worth checking out.

tl;dr – Sifu is an Action game where players use martial arts skills to pummel their way through hordes of enemies. The combat here is at turns extremely satisfying and highly frustrating, with some questionable design choices. However, playing this game on Nintendo Switch 2 does address the game’s biggest problem on Nintendo Switch by severely cutting down its insanely long loading times. This improvement alone makes this game greatly improved on Nintendo’s newer hardware, making it a good but flawed Action game worth checking out.

Grade: B-

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