As a martial arts game, Sifu is quite good. The combat is varied and crunchy, with animations and sound effects that pop. However, it wasn’t perfect at launch. It famously lacked the option to change the spoken language from English, despite the strong Chinese themes. Also, the camera wasn’t great. No, it wasn’t great at all, often getting stuck in corners and objects. (The game is incredibly popular regardless). Thankfully, developer Sloclap has been hearing the complaints. Today, Sifu gets a new patch that adds Chinese voiceovers, fixes bugs, and addresses the camera.
The patch isn’t massive, but the major highlight does bring an important change. Starting today, you can play Sifu with Mandarin Chinese voiceovers. Before, everyone in the game only spoke English — and with a variety of clashing accents. For a game featuring a story set in China, the limited voice option was a strange omission at launch.
The Sifu patch brings other fixes, notably to the funky camera. I made mention of the camera in my review of the game not too long ago. As a challenging rogue-lite, difficulty in Sifu is on the far end of the scale. And this reality was made harder with a camera that would stick to surroundings, often pulling your view off the group about to pummel you into old age. The patch addresses this at last, saying: “a pass has been done on all levels to remove camera collision and visibility on some level environments that could block the view during combat.” I don’t believe it fixes the camera’s ‘wandering’ problem, but I’ll take it.
Giving these changes a slow clap
The patch brings a little more to the fight. It fixes two infinite loop exploits, one in which you are able to keep hitting enemies with a sweep attack while they’re down, and another the involved a blade technique used on Kuroki, the Museum boss. I actually didn’t know about either of these, and I wish I did. The patch fixes an issue where the first boss, Fajar, would stop attacking after phase two. And shrine awards will stay saved once a level is completed.
For the rest, check out the patch notes.
