Recent reviews by Mataza

Great game, nice story, compelling ganeplay and level design, high replay value and very rewarding and challenging combat.
But being who I am, who is also in the target audience for this kind of game, I have complaints about what makes it fall short of perfection. This is my full opinion on some pretty narrow aspects, so bear with a bit of rambling. Game mechanics are not explained unless relevant, assume things not mentioned are perfectly functional. Most of the negative points barely matter for the "story mode" playthrough.
For context, at the time of writing this I have played 44 hours of this game. If I remember correctly, I finished the story mode in the 5-10 hour range.
But first of all let's start with some of the great points


Combo system
There is a reason one of the top guides for this game is a combo flow diagram. Certain attacks can lead into certain other attacks and the entire system of attacks only requires 6 kinds of inputs, light attacks, heavy attacks, towards enemy, away from enemy, and holding down button and delayed. The most complicated inputs for a single moves are back/forward + attack or heavy attack -delay- heavy attack. This whole system is very approachable. In implementation this is used by making certain enemies weaker to certain kind of attacks and certain combos, although the game doesn't tell you this, it lets you discover it through experimentation.

Map Design
The story takes place in 6 level/maps if you count the prologue, or 5 main levels. These are polished and lovingly crafted, with many segments paying homage to iconic martial arts and action movies. It is called paying homage if it's done well, and pop culture references when done bad, in case any reader is confused about that. On multiple occasions the game embraces style and atmosphere by morphing the environment from a nightclub to feudal burning village, or taking an elevator to descend into an infinite hole in the ground. These alternate environments are thematic to the bosses of the maps and are extremely well done.

Bosses
Introduced in the prologue, the villains seem rather generic, but they really come to life in their respective levels and the boss fights in particular. The game gives you additional information via a hint board in the menu, in addition to the environment shown in the levels themselves. A bit clunky but it gets the job done. The bosses themselves have unique attack patterns, 2 phases, the second of which includes morphing the arena and allow for different approaches with the game's combat system. Although te second one is a bit simpler and the final boss a bit stricter on the variety of approaches. The final boss is a good showcase for the combo system; only deliberate combo patterns can hit him for more than 2 hits in a single exchange.

I'll be honest, this was my intention of even writing this review, because playing the post-game and challenge content of this game, these issues become hella frustrating.

The ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Camera
Being a third person brawl fighting game, with block, parry and dodge mechanics, the camera is a key ally to keep track of the enemies and what they are doing. And in 95% of cases, this works flawlessly. The other 5% of the time, calling it temperamental doesn't even do it justice. The camera downright sabotages the player when it feels especially malicious.
The camera's favorite trick is letting an enemy move offscreen and not rotating or tracking it, while said enemy attacks. At least on PC, the camera is also pretty resistant to user control which is -again- usually fine. It pans, zooms, rotates and goes into fixed mode. This dynamic movement is where it may spontaneously decide to watch from another angle or different zoom level, ignoring your desire to keep track of enemies. And of course it goes into crisis when moving the camera into a wall.
I should also especially mention that the pre-boss cutscenes align the camera, except when you skip the cutscene. Then you can and often will start the fight looking at the floor while the boss starts attacking you.

Poor optimization
For reference, I play this with an NVIDIA 1060, which the game autodetects as good enough to put every graphics setting to its maximum. This is a lie. This game starts to chug a bit with reflective surfaces or rain on the screen, which is mostly unnoticable until the final boss fight, which takes place in a shiny and then a heavy rain environment. Which is tragic, because it does look good, but the most difficult enemy shouldn't also be made harder by lag frames screwing with the timing of your inputs in a challenging fighting game.

Auto targeting and focus menu jank
This might be a problem of which half is only relevant to mouse and keyboard players, but those are an option so I don't see a reason why I shouldn't criticize it.
Auto targeting in brawls with multiple enemies is...unpredictable. Or maybe it is predictable and just unreliable. Let me explain.
Several kinds of moves are plagued by bad autotargeting more than others, but any directional input can unpredictably change your attack target. Chasing techniques often fail with enemies in the general direction present, including attacking air on attacks that have perfect tracking. Sweeping attacks can hit enemies on the ground, but this is compeltely unsupported by autotargeting at all and fails at the slightest distrubance.
Half related to this is the focus menu. Focus is a resource similar to a super meter, letting you do unblockable attacks. You hold a button pressed, time quickly slows to an almost standstil and a radial menu opens over your current target. All good, in theory. Here is the jank. While bringing up the menu, it is impossible to input other commands, including blocking. And sometimes the menu appears with a huge delay. Which is ironic, since going for your get out of jail free card you are punished with more jail. It also doesn't is grayed out when the enemy is too far away. And the auto targeting is temperamental, so of course at times the game chooses an enemy that is out of range.

Mechanics only present in post game
If you play only the story mode and don't care about completing extra challenges, you will never come in contact with these. It is obvious they have spent time on making these and realized they are lacking or not fun.
Dishonorable mention goes to the slow motion mechanic, which is also unique to the postgame. For good reason, because it is jarring and feels buggy and terrible. Disengaging slow motion seems to quicken the current move of your enemy. I have felt that starting and stopping slow motion eats other inputs. It is bearable when it replaces the focus moves, but slow motion on blocking (but not dodging and parrying, which use the same button) is hair pullingly terrible.

---

Sifu is a great combat game that is just lacking a bit of polish in unfortunately pretty central aspects to rival some true classics with great combat like Sekiro or Batman Arkham Asylum.

Almost but not quite the Dark Souls of kung fu games.

I don't say this lightly, but Factorio is a fantastic game with only 1 flaw. The music is mid. Everything else is basically perfect.

Gameplay loop is tight. Crafting feels great. Research is engaging. The game itself is easy to learn, hard to master. The game offers you customizable world settings and well described presets. More enemies, no enemies, frequency and depth of resources. The tutorial teaches even small intricacies of mechanics. Circuit networks are easy to use for simple tasks and powerful enough to actually make programs(I heard it's turing complete). And to top it all of, the game has great mods accessible from the regular client, for ease of use, feel and atmosphere or completely overhauling the experience.
But most imprtantly you can make the science labs play muffled Karamelldansen while at work.

A greatly crafted mystery solving game. While each case has you retrace a murder, extra clues in them build the world and foreshadow future connections. that tie the whole thing into one overarching story with a neat bow.

The art style, animation and sound design work together to make the static scenes come to life and recurring characters are presented well and have their own little sideplots through the game.

Forced account creation, requiring me to go offline in order to access singleplayer. Gameplay is railroady. Ammo scarcity, overly complex mechanics and several cutscenes per mission are not action. Menus feel like navigating microsoft excel.

An insane game for insane people. Lay down your koran and switch to the one true faith of christianity, steal the nephew of your former caliph and educate that nephew, marry him to your daughter, kill all your other children, educate your grandchildren to be muslim again, raid and conquer constantinople, marry your favorite grandchild to a byzantine princess, rediscover the only one true faith that is Islam, for god is great, and marry your mother while murdering your father.

At least that's how I they told me to play this game.

I want to like this game.

But the game doesn't really reach out its hand to me, so I'm left hanging. Turn-based, grid-based games are such a rarity these days and I generally like those games.
Generally, but not in this instance.

For readers that know advance wars or something similar:
It's advance wars with the complexity sandblasted off. And suffering for this sin.


Every single unit are aligned on the following scale:
1 attack range, let's call them "cheap melee"
1-2 attack range
2-x attack range(x varies between 3 and 6), let's call them "expensive artillery"

Then assign 4 movespeed to all 1 range units, 3 to pretty much every single other unit, and assign to only ground and sea artillery a speed of 2.
So the movement of units is both laughably predictable and absolutely unexciting. Less exciting than chess in in terms of movement.


A huge majority of units also do 50% damage against their own type, and 100-150% damage against their rock-paper-scissors hard counter victims. So there is a lot of instant kills if you vaguely know what you do.
What if a unit is damaged but not destroyed?
Suicide attack to get rid of it.
You can't join damaged units together and you can't repair non infantry units. And infantry units are barely worth saving since they are incredibly cheap.
On top of that your army is not just limited by income and by being destroyed, but also by a limit of supply attached to money producing cities.

Terrain is also simplistic. The movement changes are either 50% less movement(forests, mountains), or 50% more movement(streets). Water freezes for a couple of turns after "midnight", and frozen water is identical to boring old ground.
Air units are unaffected by terrain. Only infantry can move over mountains. Cacti on the map can be used by infantry to suck on juice and repair themselves in exchange for not doing anything productive.
So every unit will probably spend most of their time running along streets and infantry will stand on buildings sometimes.

And that is the extent of this games complexity.


The story is weak and at the same time barely there. There is so few dialogue, only at the beginning of a mission, and what little dialogue there is is riddled with spelling errors and entire missing words at one point.
The art seems to have received some love by the creators, but I don't really care much as long as it works.


So overall, I cannot recommend this game, as much as I would want to.

Outstanding dark lonely atmosphere. Stellar visual story telling, not needing a single spoken or written word.
Trial and error gameplay, with many, many, many & decent save points. To the point that death is reduced to an inconvenience.
Though I googled 4 of the 9 or so glowing eggs because a big section in the middle has not a single one and 3 eggs are hidden in pipes and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ drawers on the ceiling(no joke).
BUT having grown up with video games I have beaten every challenge and seen everything this game has to offer in just 11 hours.
11 hours of great fun.
If you value quality over long playtime, buy Limbo.

This looks like a simulator, but this is a game.
A simulator would try to be as realistic as possible, and that is already out of the window when creationism vs. evolution is an issue in every country, rather than only the USA.
And if you start as america, you have a worldwide educational and technological advantage and still lack qualified workers. And then black terrorists storm the white house every 3 months trying to kill you.

Still, a few things are realistic:
Tax the rich 90% of everything they own, earn and think of buying, and they selfishly leave the country, leaving you with poor, low income, workshy masses who are happy to live from unemployment benefits, totally destroying your GDP, education, technology and economy.
Too bad you can't raise the berlin wall at that point to stop the rich and educated from leaving your marxist utopia in the making.
Really guys, it's for your own good. Come back, somebody needs to pay taxes.

I am amazed how this has any good reviews.
The standard product is buying the game twice, so you can give it to a friend. Really it looks like it's trying to justify charging 23 bucks for a single sale.

Aside from all other critical thoughts I also had the displeasure of graphical and gameplay bugs in the first 2 hours of simple campaign play.

The game is paradoxical in almost every aspect:

It is a turn based game,
yet ultimately actions are done timebased.

It puts very little effort in the story telling,
yet it drowns the player in expositional dossiers, conversations and monologues. Luckily you can skip them all.
You need to micromanage and possibly run simulations of every nanosecond,
yet the choices you can make are very simple and gameplay lacks any depth.

Machine gunners are the "bread and butter" unit you control very precisely,
yet their aim is so horrendous that engagements outside of shotgun range feel completely luckbased.

Waist high objects give cover,
yet standing on the corner of a wall does not give sideways cover.

Standing behind waist-high cover is an advantage,
yet ducking(so you fit below waist-high cover) has no effect aside from hiding behind cover.




I mentioned gameplay lacking depth, let me go into more detail on that.
Your mindless drones have no inventory and never need to reload. You can not change weaponry, the drones you use or how they are distributed on the map at the start of a singleplayer mission.
The options available are wait, move, aim, duck, ignore all enemies, ignore a specific enemy and prioritze a specific enemy and reversals of these commands.
That's it.
If your guys are in ♥♥♥♥ positions, your enemy has to make a mistake. Your drones can not have more than object in their hands. So unless that object is a grenade thrower or rocket launcher, the only feasible "strategies" are
1. to be in a good position and aim, motionless, at the correct angle.
2. move, preferrably without line of sight, to a better position and do 1.
3. exploit positioning mistakes of the stupid AI and shoot them in the back. If even possible. If not possible, do 1.

If a drone is standing still and an opposed drone comes around the corner, both having the same weapon, equal cover and given all appropriate commands(aim at that direction, focus specific enemy), then the drone that stood still will always win.
There is no time to outmaneuver the enemy drone with your own drone in a single turn, either. Rewarding inaction with 100% chance to win an encounter is atrocious game design.

The graphical bug I encountered seceral times was hatched green neon lines connecting my selected units with my other units for no apparent reason

The gameplay bug I encountered after a particularly long processing time for the first turn, including 2 prompts to kill the program, because it didnt respond.
It changed a unit of mine from a sniper to a machine gunner. While no other downsides, it was an annoyance.


The music was nice, I guess.


In summary, a shallow and unresponsive tactical game that requires huge amounts of micromanaging miniscule movements.
It feels like playing counterstrike without grenades from the top down perspective, which is entirely the wrong perspective for that kind of gameplay and also lacks grenades.

Would not recommend.

It´s Dota with generally better ping.
If you played any game of the "moba" or DotA genre, this one is the namegiver, upgraded to HD.