Rematch review
Even to a footy agnostic, this multiplayer sports game offers an exciting and acrobatic contest of skill. Brilliant, for as long as it doesn’t crash.
- Developer: Sloclap
- Publisher: Sloclap, Kepler Interactive
- Release: June 19th, 2025
- On: Windows
- From: Steam
- Price: £21/$30/€25
- Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7-11700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, Windows 10
I am getting a real kick out of Rematch. As a football game, its closest analogue isn’t FIFA or eFootball, but a certain nitro-boosting sports ’em up that has been going for ten years. I’ve already seen it jokingly described as “Rocket League without cars.” An infuriatingly accurate description that does half my job for me. My list of irritations with it is long. But there is something so compelling about the kick-by-kick play, each match a little drama, that I will gladly scrunch that list of complaints into a ball and toepoke it into a waste paper basket on the other side of the room. GOOOAAALLL!
This is multiplayer football as imagined by Sloclap, the developers of kung fu games Sifu and Absolver. Fans of buttery body movements will be glad to know that the studio’s command of expressive and fluid animation remains intact. These ball experts can really blatter that sports sphere. You control a single player on the field, sprinting up and down and yelling “cross it!” with a tap of a button to ask for a chance to even tap the ball, like some desperate schoolkid at lunch time.
Watch on YouTube
Once got, movement is a good balance of straightforward legging it and working some judicious button combinations when under threat. The game hasn’t over-egged things with move upon move upon move, but pared the beautiful game back to a few select gimmicks that make each rapid encounter with an opponent its own little mind game of direction and speed. This is a skill-based game, but it doesn’t feel difficult to learn the basics of ball control.
You can tackle folks with a simple footpoke at their ankles, or do a more powerful slide tackle at their feet (at the risk of missing and ending up lagging behind in the chase). While in possession, you can avoid tackles by bopping the ball lightly in another direction, dancing around your shin accoster with a defensive dribble, or trickily toe-tapping the ball into the air – a showy rainbow flick that is endlessly embarrassing to be caught out by, yet smugly satisfying to pull off yourself.
It’s best not to overuse the sliding tackle, but when it works – mmmmmm. | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Sloclap
Even though the ball “sticks” to you while dribbling, it still feels like its own entity, drifting away just a touch any time you sprint while in possession, making it more easily claimed by any opposing footyist in range. Doing an about-face which tucks the ball backward under your heels might feel triumphant for only a second, when you realise there’s another player waiting there to nab it. Get close to the goalposts and a firm pull of the right trigger will see you shoot. Hold it down longer to charge up a stronger hoof. To my hands it all feels fluid and smooth, even if an encounter with multiple tacklers can sometimes become a chaotic pile-on of slide tackles and stumbles.
I mostly played quick matches of 3v3. These are casual games with lots of goals and a nippy turnover. If either team gets a four-goal lead they win the game under the “mercy rule”, which prevents matches from turning into steamrolled episodes of despair. Otherwise matches are timed to six minutes. There are also 4v4 and 5v5 quick matches, but I feel like a lot of players will either stick to friendly low-stakes three-a-side, or step into the ranked matches for larger games, where teams of five face off in matchmade bouts across six divisions – bronze, silver, gold, platinum, diamond, and elite.
As in many a multiplayer face-off, you can customise your victory pose. | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Sloclap
Games go a little steadier with the larger headcount, and it feels like you’ll need more co-ordination – or at least a good instinctive rapport – to make any headway. Certainly there are fewer noticeable instances of Ronaldo syndrome. This “ball hog” phenomenon is seemingly driving some players crazy (I saw one complaint on Steam asking for passing to become “mandatory”). The game is replicating the spirit of football so accurately, that it allows for this frustration to develop. When it feels this fun to be in control of the ball and swivel around everyone with grace, it is natural that some people will not want to give up their moment in the spotlight.
Of course, this leads to inevitable loss due to many Dunning-Krugerites who did not seem to get the message of the game’s tutorial prologue. This part-playable, part-cinematic sequence is a story about a scouted player whose showy talent won’t get him as far as he expected without learning to work as a unit with his team mates. It’s a well-told tale, entirely without dialogue, and further proof if it were needed that Sloclap have some very competent and thoughtful animators and storyboarders. If FIFA’s story modes could tell their equivalent tales of tactics and teamwork with as much efficacy and grace as this ten-minute tutorial, they might not have to rely on turning their game into a slot machine.
You can customise both home and away colours for your kit, and slowly unlock new clothes as you gain XP. | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Sloclap
That’s not to say Rematch is free from all the usual live service graft. There are DLC cosmetics (four quid for a pair of trainers, eight quid to play as Ronaldinho) as well as the inevitable season pass, in which you unlock new shorts, shirts, haircuts, and other stuff – a string of pearls with some marked as free and others requiring you buy that “Captain pass” every few months. It’s not too in-your-face, though, and as per common game design wisdom, there’s nothing to alter how speedy you shoot or how quickly your stamina recharges. There are no stats to boost or skills to unlock either, so the playing field remains mercifully level.
Being goalkeeper is my favourite position on said playing field. I’m not so hot when it comes to dribbling around a tacklebastard, but between the posts I can focus on one job. The diving is responsive and covers a lot of air. A good goalkeeper can win the day and lock down the game. I am an OK goalkeeper. All the tricks of real life football come to bully you in the box. The cunning crosses, the unexpected longshots, the nippy flat ones that hug the ground when you don’t expect them to. It is humiliating to fall for another trick, in which an attacker bounces the ball off the magical football forcefield above the posts and then taps it in with the rebound. There is a button to say “Sorry” in Rematch. I find myself using it a lot.
This was a moment of panic, I admit. | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Sloclap
You won’t stay as keeper throughout the match, though. The starting positions rotate with each post-goal kick-off, the game encouraging players to put in some time at all roles on the field. I like this, because no matter my desire to be the bulwark, it pulls you out to take a shot or two in every casual game. Although I’ve seen plenty of netphobes who cannot wait one second in a defensive position. Leaving the goal open is something that you might have to do as a team once in a while, especially during 3v3 matches. But abandoning it every time it’s assigned to you invites vulture-like longshots – a totally valid tactic. No opportunity goes wasted. This is less a criticism of the game and more an observation about how it will inevitably be played, as beginners learn the importance of teamwork, positioning, and not being a selfish asshat.
Most people, I should stress, are not like that. The in-game comms allows for cries of “Thanks” or “We got this”. All good, friendly material, even if the cry of another line – “Good job!” – is already being used sarcastically for every open goal you fluff. Even simpler lines of decent sportsmanship would be nice, like a quick way to say “Good game” to players of both teams when the clock hits zero. I feel like a sulky Suarez at the end of every match when we all walk away without so much as a head nod.
When a team mate shouts “pass” a little blue line will appear to show who’s calling. | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Sloclap
The game boasts no interruptions to play. And, okay yes, there are no fouls, offsides, or throw-ins to stop play dead with an irksome whistle, but there are interruptions in a more mundane crashing-to-desktop-quite-a-lot sense. I have seen hangs, server drops, and weird bugs that froze me on the field as my teammates played around me. As networking and stability goes, this not a flawless game. The devs recently apologised for not including crossplay at launch, and it’s somewhat disappointing to see Sloclap fall victim to technical problems in the same way that fighting game Absolver was affected on its release in 2017.
This is the silent hero of the prologue. He learns not to be a ball hog. Be like him. | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Sloclap
There are other flies in the Deep Heat. The post match screens infuriate me because they automatically change from stats screen to another screen while you’re in the middle of looking at the number of saves or passes you made. There are theoretically useful practice challenges against bots where you try to keep possession or intercept passes, but they’ll sling you out to the main menu after every failure, rather than offering a quick way to restart. Critically, there is no way to remap keybinds or controls, the current extent of available customisations being limited to a choice between three very similar presets. And there’s no way to turn on camera lock (wherein the camera automatically follows the ball) without choosing one of these controller presets and messing up your twitchy memory of the default buttons.
All of these nits irritate me enough to be duly picked, but they all feel obvious and changeable, inevitable to be fixed as more folks complain they can’t rebind the pass button to Numpad 7 or whatever personal keyboard insanity you suffer from. I’m saying that I’ve seen Sloclap fix their broken online game before, and I trust them to do it again.
It’s telling that the missing feature I desire most is not an emote or a graphics setting or a – pffft – “mandatory pass”. But just some way to auto-rematch, so I don’t have to tap Y at the end of every game within a 10-second countdown to re-enter the queue for another game. This is how moreish (and perfectly named) Rematch is. My biggest complaint is that I’m sick of the game asking “Do you want to play again?” Of course I do.
