Sifu Beginners Guide

Useful Combat and Survival Tips for Beginners – How to Beat Sifu on PS4 and PS5

Sifu is a very difficult game; there’s no getting around that fact. It requires solid focus, great reflexes, and consistent timing to master. The apparent difficulty can be extremely daunting for a first-time player, so we’ve prepared this Sifu Beginners Guide of our six best tips for getting to grips with the Sifu gameplay.

Replay Chapters Often

As they say, practice makes perfect, and you’re probably not going to get very far if you try to brute force your way through Sifu.

Each time you are defeated in Sifu, your character will increase in age. At age 75, its game over.

So, if you brute force your way through the Squats, finishing at age 48, and then go on to brute force the Club, you’ll be lucky to make it out alive.

It would be best if you were willing to replay stages repeatedly until you get them down perfectly. Throughout this process, you will earn plenty of XP that you can spend on permanently unlocking skills that you want.

Then, once you have mastered the Squats, for example, and beat the first boss while you’re still under 30 years old, you will be able to start the Club chapter at that age every time.

You can then replay the Club until you beat it at an age you’re happy with, then move on to the next Chapter.

Keep this up, unlocking skills the whole time, focusing on improving your reflexes, and learning to deal with different enemy types. Then you’ll start to feel like a real Kung Fu master.

Learn to Avoid ASAP

Avoiding is a subtler and more tight form of dodging you can employ in Sifu, and it is the true key to success. Using avoid correctly will allow you to quickly evade enemy attacks without losing your footing or breaking your flow.

It is incredibly tricky to pull off at first, especially as it requires keen timing, and there are no enormous flashing warning signs to indicate that you’re about to take a punch like there are in other games.

To avoid a high attack, you need to hold and push down quickly. To avoid a low attack, like a leg sweep, you will need to hold and push up. You will need to time the maneuver well otherwise you will take the hit, or at the very least block it.

Avoiding will refill your Structure and Focus bars slightly, allowing you to keep the battle going and even spam your Focus abilities in some situations.

Use Weapons

There are weapons all over in Sifu. Some are one-time-use weapons like Bottles, which can help you start a fight off with the upper hand.

Other more resilient weapons, like Metal Pipes and Baseball Bats, will last much longer and allow you to quickly take out several enemies before you must replace the weapon.

You can buy durability and proficiency upgrades at shrines that make these weapons last longer or deal more damage, which is honestly not a bad idea if you know where to find plenty of weapons in a Chapter.

Hitting an enemy who is unaware of your presence with a weapon before they can spot you will instantly trigger a takedown prompt, allowing you to press + to take them out immediately.

Weapons, naturally, also do more damage to enemies than your open palms, so it is wise to make proper use of any weapon you find. In particular, weapons are ideal for breaking enemy structure, allowing you to stagger them quicker and use takedowns more often.

Unlock Skills Permanently

In Sifu, you can unlock skills permanently by purchasing them several times after a temporary unlock. See our Sifu Skills Guide for more info.

It would help if you prioritized this over buying new skills for your first few runs. This way, every subsequent run will start with you already being equipped with some handy ways to dispatch your foes.

We wrote a guide on the Best Skills to Unlock First if you’d like a nudge in the right direction.

Sweep the Leg on Tough Enemies

One of the best and cheapest skills you can permanently unlock in Sifu is the Strong Sweep Focus skill. With a full Focus Bar segment, you can hold and then target your opponent’s leg before pressing to trigger a devastating strike to the knee.

Your opponent will drop to the ground from this, causing them to drop any weapons they have and opening them up to a ground attack. Hold over a downed opponent to get a few extra hits in on them.

Apart from being a great way to steal an enemy’s weapon before they can use it on you, it’s also useful for temporarily getting rid of more formidable enemies in group fights so that you can focus on dispatching the weaker foes.

You can also use it to buy yourself some breathing room in some boss fights.

Use the Focus Bar

I recall that I ignored the Focus bar for my first playthroughs. I think I was saving the bar for when I needed it in a boss fight, but it doesn’t take that long to recharge (especially if you avoid) and can be used to execute essential survival techniques like the Strong Sweep attack mentioned above.

You should also note that the game slows down dramatically when you hold . This slowdown effect can be employed as a beneficial survival strategy, allowing you to survey the area and the surrounding enemies. You can even tell what attack some enemies are preparing and figure out the ideal way to avoid taking damage.

You can upgrade your Focus Bar at Shrines throughout the game, which will allow you to stockpile Focus Abilities and even execute them back-to-back when things get tricky. These upgrades are not permanent, however.

That’s about all we’ve got to share with you for now, but it should be more than enough to get you acquainted with the unique difficulty offered in Sifu’s excellent Kung Fu gameplay, throughout the first few chapters at least.

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