What Are the Best Skills to Unlock First in Sifu

Which Skills Should you Permanently Unlock First in Sifu?

Unlocking skills permanently in Sifu can take a long time, especially for some skills that cost 1,5000 XP. Getting the 9000 XP required to permanently unlock a higher-cost skill in a single run can feel a little impossible during your first few playthroughs.

Strong Sweep Focus

The Strong Sweep Focus is an essential skill. This ability can be the grain of rice that tips the scale in your favor. The best use of this skill is for disarming enemies who have pipes or other such weapons, allowing you to steal their weapon and gain the upper hand.

It can also be used to take down big enemies, temporarily putting them out of commission so that you can ground attack them, or at least stop them being a concern during group fights for a short while.

To use Strong Sweep Focus, you will need a full focus bar segment. Once ready, hold to slow time and then select Strong Sweep from the bottom-right corner of the Focus Wheel with .

Strong Sweep Focus costs 500 XP. Permanently purchasing it will cost a total of 3000 XP (Initial purchase + 5x Permanent Purchase).

Environmental Mastery

Environmental Mastery was the first skill that I purchased permanently and it gave me a great upper hand in a lot of the first few fights.

This skill allows you to hit while standing over certain objects to kick them at enemies. This includes bottles, weapons, and some otherwise-unusable objects in your surroundings. You can even use bottles without having to drop your current weapon by employing the use of this skill.

It opens up a lot more opportunities for attacking and dispatching enemies that you otherwise wouldn’t have access to, like kicking bricks at people’s heads in the Squats, or sliding seats under the big Bouncers in the Club, knocking them on their asses.

Using one of these opportunities at the start of a fight can make things go a lot smoother, sometimes even triggering takedown opportunities early.

Environmental Mastery costs 1000 XP and permanently purchasing it will require a total of 6000 XP (Initial purchase + 5x Permanent Purchase).

Charged Backfist

Charged Backfist is a skill that can really come in handy against single enemies. It’s pretty useless in a group because you do need to charge up the attack by holding , but it deals a lot of damage and can even be used while holding a bat or blade weapon.

Successfully thwacking an enemy in the face with a fully charged Backfist will leave them stunned, giving you plenty of room to get a few more hits in.

Charged Backfist is going to cost 1000 XP to unlock and a total of 6000 XP to unlock permanently (Initial purchase + 5x Permanent Purchase).

Invert Throw

Evasion is important in Sifu, if you want to reach the final boss as young as possible, then you will need as many ways to avoid taking damage as possible.

The Invert throw ability is just that; another way to evade death. By pressing and pushing towards an enemy just after you’ve hit them, you can swap places with them.

The best application for this ability is to get some distance when you’re surrounded. If there’s a full circle of enemies around you and you’re starting to feel overwhelmed, you can use Invert Throw on one of the enemies to put yourself on the outside of the circle, where you can get away and catch your breath for a moment.

Invert Throw costs just 500 XP to unlock and a total of 3000 XP to unlock permanently (Initial purchase + 5x Permanent Purchase).

Crotch Punch

Crotch Punch is one of the most expensive abilities in the game, but it can be very useful for breaking an enemy’s attack combo and simply stunning them for a moment.

The attack also counts as an “avoid” maneuver, so you will duck under high strikes while executing the attack.

The skill costs a whopping 1500 XP to unlock for the first time, and acquiring it permanently will require an eye-watering 9000 XP (Initial purchase + 5x Permanent Purchase).

That concludes our list of the five Best Skills to Unlock in Sifu. These five skills should be plenty for getting you through the first two or three chapters of the game.

Once you’re accustomed, you can then start experimenting with some of the other options and get your head around what you’d like to unlock next.

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